


The Hills Are Alive (with the Sound of Magic)

by notaverse



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dragons, M/M, Magic, Quest, uke!Jin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-01
Updated: 2011-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-24 05:41:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 41,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notaverse/pseuds/notaverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A renegade mage finds his quest goes in quite a different direction than planned when he winds up sharing a jail cell with an aspiring bard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** The Hills Are Alive (with the Sound of Magic)  
>  **Fandom:** KAT-TUN  
>  **Pairing:** Kame x Jin  
>  **Rating:** PG-13  
>  **Genre:** AU, fantasy, fluff  
>  **Disclaimer:** Not mine, damnit

Kame wasn't sure what he'd done to land up in jail. Not this time. He vaguely recalled threatening to turn a carriage driver into one of his own horses, but everything after that blurred into one hazy, embarrassing mess, courtesy of the red wine he'd had with his supper. Perhaps he shouldn't have started on that second bottle.

He hoped they'd let him out by morning, or the innkeeper was liable to throw his luggage out on the street if he didn't show up to pay for another day in the room. He hadn't been in town long enough to get to know anyone; didn't have a friend to come speak for him. Kame never stayed anywhere long enough for that.

He couldn't even use his magic to unlock the cell door. The jailhouse sat in the middle of an anti-magic field, cutting him off from his source of power, squeezing him into a tiny, invisible bubble where his body felt numb and useless. He missed the sparks tingling in his fingertips, teasing him with the promise of magic in the atmosphere, just waiting for him to channel it as he wished. Even the little bit he'd stored in his own body for emergencies wouldn't work, not with the alcohol ruining what focus he had left.

Now all he had was a headache and a pair of bruised wrists where one of the town constables had seized him. With nothing better to do, Kame brushed off one of the narrow beds, punched the lone, lumpy pillow into shape, and settled down to sleep off the wine.

Less than a minute after he'd closed his eyes the door opened with a crash, and a young man in a plaid hooded cape stumbled into the cell. Kame sat up in bed just in time to see the newcomer raise his middle finger at the door as it closed.

"You'd better hope he didn't see that," Kame said. "You might not get any breakfast."

The stranger shot him a look of unbridled horror and sank down on the other bed. The bed sank in turn, sagging in the middle till its occupant was forced to huddle in the one corner that seemed stable enough to support him. Kame hoped his new roommate could sleep sitting up.

"Figures," the stranger grumbled, pushing his hood back to reveal a smooth, pretty face only saved from being too girlish by the thick and obviously untended eyebrows. "I knew it was a bad sign when my G-string snapped as soon as I got into town. I should've moved straight onto the next one."

Kame cast a glance over the cape-covered body, not seeing anything through all the plaid. He hadn't moved like he was having underwear issues, though. "G-string?"

"On my _guitar_. Which is probably going to get tossed out of the Dancing Teapot when I don't show up to collect it because I'm stuck in here!"

"You're staying there too?" Kame said. He'd only tried the inn because he'd found the sign irresistibly cute. "The innkeeper told me I got the last room."

"I think he says that to everyone."

Snarling, the stranger thumped a fist on the mattress, then let out a squawk as a sharp spring poked through. Kame gave up all hope of a quiet night's sleep. Clearly, his cellmate planned to rant and grouse until someone decided he'd been in there long enough and turned him loose.

Might as well introduce himself. Maybe the stranger would be sufficiently awed to spend the night in stunned silence and let Kame sleep off the effects of the wine in peace.

"I'm Kame," he said.

" _The_ Kame? Seriously?"

Kame hadn't expected the other man to actually know who he was. "You've heard of me?"

"Nope, but the way you said your name sounded like I should've. Are you famous or something?"

 _More like infamous, and only in certain circles._ "Not unless you're one of my relatives."

No longer raging at his mattress, the stranger snorted and cracked a smile. "Guess not, then. I'm Jin Akanishi and I'm pretty sure we're not related. That a first name or a last name?"

"A nickname." Kame never gave out his full name. Not these days. He made a small bow, then immediately regretted it when his head started spinning. "Nice to meet you. Why'd they throw you in here tonight?"

"Solicitation."

It would be just Kame's luck to land up in a jail cell with a gorgeous male hooker when he wasn't up to doing anything about it. Not that he could see if Jin had a decent body or not beneath the oversized cloak and baggy trousers.

"Dressed like that? Who were you trying to solicit - monks?"

Jin glared at him. "I said that's what they threw me in here for - not what I was doing. I was just trying to get people to watch my performance. A few hip rolls never hurt anyone, you know?"

"Actually, there's a certain ritual in the far south where they-"

Kame caught himself before he said too much. No sense letting on where he'd been, or what he'd learned, or what he could do. Not to a perfect stranger. Jin was obviously living on the road too, which meant there was a chance they'd cross paths again, and Kame didn't want anyone to possess enough pieces to put together the complete puzzle of Kazuya Kamenashi.

"I mean...performance?" Kame said brightly, brushing aside his earlier response. The guitar comment made sense now. "You're a musician?"

"I'm a bard!" Jin scratched his neck and added, "Or will be when they finally let me in the Guild, anyway. I'm _this_ close to passing the trials."

Most of the bards Kame had met were sombre, greybearded men who sang mournful tributes to death and despair, or stilted tales of courtly love. The rest were sombre, grey-hatted women who sang more or less the same thing, only higher in pitch. Perhaps the trials to enter the Bardic Guild would be gruelling enough to transform Jin into one of their number, but Kame doubted it. Not even the trials to enter the Mages' Guild were harsh enough to double one's age, as Kame had good reason to know.

"Don't take this the wrong way," Kame said, "but you don't seem the bardic type. I don't generally associate hip rolls with dirges."

"I'm going to be a bard." Jin folded his arms stubbornly across his chest. "The trials are based on talent, and they're going to let me in whether they like it or not."

Kame remembered saying something similar to his mentor, once. Kimura had laughed kindly and told him to keep practising the basics.

He gave Jin a smile of encouragement. "Then good luck, Ji-, uh, Mr. Akanishi." Names were important in magic, but they were no less meaningful in everyday social interaction, and Kame always tried to be polite.

"Jin's fine. I don't think there's much room for etiquette in a jail cell."

"There's not room for much of anything," Kame agreed. The two beds took up most of the floor space in the small, drafty room. As accommodations went, he'd had worse, but he preferred better. Much better.

"Which is why I need to get out of here as soon as possible."

"Claustrophobic?"

"No, but if I have to spend all night in here I might be by morning." Jin squirmed in his corner of the bed. Another spring popped out of the mattress; this one shot across the room, bouncing off the wall behind Kame and dropping to the floor. "At least your bed's still in one piece."

The spring digging into Kame's leg told him this might not be the case for much longer. "Only just," he said. "I don't suppose you're any good at picking locks?"

"I want to join the Bardic Guild, not the Thieves' Guild!"

That didn't leave them with many options. The cell's only window was barred, with a scenic view of an alley, and the steel door, which Kame could easily have wrenched open with magic, stood between them and freedom. The guard down the end of the corridor would hear them if they tried to exit through either, in any case.

Kame omitted all mention of magic when he laid out their choices for Jin. "I think our best bet is to try call the guard, and jump him when he comes in. I'm not planning on staying in this town any longer than it takes me to get back to the Dancing Teapot and collect my things. You?"

"The same," Jin said, "but don't you think someone's going to notice two guys slinking out the jailhouse after dark, and find that maybe a little suspicious? I look harmless but you've got a cunning face. And you never did tell me what you did to get yourself locked up, either."

So much for keeping magic out of it. Kame sighed and leaned across the narrow strip of space between their beds, hunching down over his knees.

"I got in a fight with a carriage driver," he confessed. "I think. I'd had too much to drink, threatened to turn him into one of his own horses." He held out reddened knuckles as proof of the fight.

Working transformative magic on living creatures was illegal, but Kame was fairly certain he'd been locked up for committing a physical assault rather than threatening a magical one. After all, he'd never given anyone reason to believe he even had the power to turn a man into a horse. Not for the last couple of years.

"So that would make you a violent, drunken braggart? You don't seem like one."

"I'm not, usually," Kame said, "but I'm sure he did something to deserve it."

Jin's face said he wasn't entirely convinced by this but would play along anyway if it got him out of the cell. "And can you turn someone into a horse?"

"No...but I can make our clothes look like uniforms, once we leave the building. No one will notice two more constables on the streets."

"Not unless we get called on to foil a crime," Jin said, but he did look slightly more enthused about Kame's idea. "Why only once we leave the building? Wouldn't it make more sense to disguise ourselves _before_ we get outside?"

"I can't use magic in here, Jin."

"Why not? Is there some kind of rule saying you can't use it in jail?" Jin teased. "Is it against the la- oh. If you could use magic in here, you wouldn't still be here, would you?"

"There's an anti-magic field covering the whole building," Kame said shortly. Talking about magic to non-mages never went well. They couldn't feel the things he felt. "It stops me reaching out for the magic in the atmosphere."

"Outside the building?"

"Outside my body. Mages..." Kame took a deep breath, released it slowly, and tried to explain. "Mages are just people who have the ability to touch magic, to take it and make it do things. We don't generate it ourselves. Anti-magic fields cut us off from it. It's like I'm wearing such thick gloves that I can't feel anything through them."

"Does it hurt?" Jin asked.

Kame shook his head, realised the wine had stopped sloshing around it and came up smiling. "Not usually. But you can see why I'm still stuck in here."

"Not for much longer. Do you want to distract the guard or knock him out?"

Such an appealing pair of choices. Kame rather thought he'd hit enough people for one night.

"You scream that I've collapsed, and when the guard rushes in to examine my unconscious body, you hit him while he's distracted. We shut him in the cell and make a quick, discreet exit...and we do not stop moving for anything."

Jin let out an earpiercing shriek before Kame had even settled himself on the floor; Kame scrambled to lie prone as Jin followed it up with a convincingly panicked monologue at top volume about how his cellmate had suddenly started frothing at the mouth and collapsed, and how even though they didn't really know each other, it was distressing and something ought to be done and they needed a doctor immediately and-

"That ought to attract attention, even if it's just someone yelling at him to shut up," Kame muttered. He had no idea Jin possessed such a powerful set of lungs, though he supposed it would be an advantage for a bard.

After a good three minutes of fake, frenzied panic, Jin finally shut his mouth and glared at the door. It remained defiantly closed.

"Maybe he's asleep?" Kame suggested.

"Who could sleep through that? Maybe he's dead?"

"I'm not sure the dead could sleep through that racket either. More likely, he just doesn't care."

Kame brushed himself off, glad the tiny lantern overhead didn't provide enough light for him to gauge the state of the cell floor. He'd change back into his travelling gear just as soon as he got clear of this stupid place, anyway. They were going to have to devise a Plan B.

Jin didn't look as though he was going to be much help. Having caught his breath, he'd taken up whistling, a tune Kame thought he recognised as 'Rescue'.

"Jin, can you-" Kame began, but stopped short when the guard rushed in and seized Jin by the arm. "Where are you going?"

"I have no idea!"

If Jin was going, Kame was going too, he decided. The guard didn't seem to care whether he tagged along or not, and showed no interest in closing the cell door.

No interest in anything, in fact, except dragging Jin down the corridor. Jin's efforts to speak to him were all for naught as the guard stared straight ahead, eyes blank and mouth shut.

As if he were entranced, Kame thought, but that wasn't possible. Not inside an anti-magic field. And the field was definitely still active, he could tell; its stifling cloak swaddled every inch of him, and even seemed to be draining his emergency stash. He filed the thought away to be considered later, when he wasn't rushing to keep up. The guard moved so fast Jin's cloak kept catching in doors.

Nobody gave them so much as a second glance as they exited the building - people being strongarmed _out_ of jail were not nearly as exciting as those going the other way - so Kame decided to abandon the camouflage plan. He didn't know where they were going; better to conserve his strength for another time, especially since it had been leached away by his brief incarceration. He could touch it now, the magic. The invisible gloves peeled away and that tingle, that hypersensitivity in his fingertips, made a welcome return.

"He won't let go," Jin muttered as Kame drew alongside him. "He's got a grip like an ogre! Can't you zap him or something?"

"Last resort," Kame said.

It occurred to him that since he was now out of jail and apparently inconsequential to the guard, he could simply take off on his own, leaving Jin to fend for himself. But that didn't seem right, somehow. What if Jin was being taken away to be hanged? (Not a very likely prospect, given the crime he'd been accused of, but not completely out of the question.)

Nothing to do but follow, and Kame did, through dark, empty streets and across the footbridge...all the way back to the Dancing Teapot.

"Home," the guard declared, depositing Jin on the front steps of the inn.

Jin stared blankly at him. "For one night, maybe..."

"Just don't argue," Kame hissed, nudging Jin towards the door. "He's leaving; I think we should do the same."

They watched the guard retrace his steps till he faded out of sight, then ducked through the big wooden doors.

The Dancing Teapot, despite the genteel name, made its living by selling drink a great deal stronger than tea and if the sounds coming from inside the inn were any indication, business was brisk tonight. Kame didn't feel inclined to stop for a nightcap. The sooner he moved on, the better.

Up the backstairs they went, both hitting the same creaking step. Kame fished in his pockets for his room key, couldn't find it. He jumped when Jin's voice came from behind him.

"Problem?"

"Can't find my key," Kame said. "It must've fallen out at some point during my unusually exciting night."

Jin flashed him a sly grin. "So you don't normally get thrown in jail, then?"

"Not enough to make a habit of it."

Under normal circumstances, Kame had never had enough finesse to move the tumblers inside a lock with magic - his mentor had always told him to visualise it in his mind first, and Kame's drawing skills, mental or otherwise, left a lot to be desired. Consequently he didn't pick locks so much as break them and hope for the best.

"You should go collect your own things," he told Jin. "I don't know what was wrong with that guard but when someone else notices that we've disappeared, the first place they'll check will be here - unless you lied about your lodgings when they brought you in?"

"It didn't occur to me," Jin said. "I didn't do anything wrong."

He sounded so innocent, Kame thought. He probably wasn't, if he thought hip rolls were a crowd-pleaser, but it was a pleasant illusion. Most people Kame met were sly, devious, obviously up to something and scheming for their own ends. If Jin had a hidden agenda, it was buried too deeply for Kame to see.

"The town constabulary won't see it that way. Go get your things."

With a quick glance down the stairs, Jin nodded and crossed the hall to his own room. Kame watched long enough to know Jin had better luck hanging onto keys, then turned his attention to the lock. He didn't like damaging other people's property, he really didn't, but there was no way around it this time.

It helped to be able to see what he was doing. One day, Kame vowed, he'd once more be able to target by thought alone, but those days were behind him for now. If he squinted, he could just about see a sliver of the metal bolt sitting between the door and the frame.

And if he could see it, he could move it.

To Kame, magic felt like the warmth of a hearthfire, cocooning him in gentle, comforting heat - until he reached for it. Then the fire blazed into life, sizzling against his fingertips as he seized the sparks, snatching them up to use their energy. Energy translated into motion as Kame willed the bolt to slide back into the lock, jamming it forcibly into place. A muted thud heralded his success, and Kame allowed himself a moment of triumph. Maybe he didn't need the ruby after all.

It didn't take him long to collect his things; he rarely stayed in one place long enough to unpack properly, and experience had taught him it was wise to prepare for a sudden exit. He took a moment to exchange his stained waistcoat for a fresh one and don his long, leather coat and matching gloves, that he might present a more respectable figure leaving the inn than he'd done arriving. The room was already paid for through till morning - by going now, Kame actually lost money on the arrangement, but he wasn't about to track down the innkeeper and ask for a refund.

"Ready to go?"

Kame whirled around to find Jin standing behind him, guitar case in hand and a bag slung over one shoulder. The plaid hooded cape had been replaced by a cream one...or so Kame thought until he spotted a hint of plaid inside the hood. Reversible.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say to Jin that hey, it was great doing time together and all but he travelled alone and picking up a wannabe bard wasn't on his agenda, but something stopped him, made those words disappear and replaced them with a casual "Yeah". Kame wasn't completely sure why, but since he made a point of following his instincts now and his instincts were telling him sticking with Jin was a good idea, he chose to believe them.

"Watch for the third step," Jin warned as he followed Kame back down the stairs. "It creaks."

"That's the fourth step."

"Third," Jin insisted.

It turned out to be half the damned staircase that creaked, in the end, because Jin had to walk straight down the middle thanks to his guitar case. Kame winced with every step, but no one heard them over the off-key caterwauling coming from the bar.

Jin pointed an indignant finger at the door as they left and muttered, "I can do much better than that!"

"I should hope so, or you'd be laughed out of the trials before you even got to take them," Kame said.

"They'll laugh me out anyway if I don't restring my guitar." Jin looked longingly down the street, where closed shops mocked him with blank shutters and dark windows. "I guess I should've bought spares earlier."

"You can get in the next town. I don't think waiting around for the shops to open in the morning is a good idea."

Jin gave him a "no kidding" look and started away from the inn.

"I might...I might be able to fix it for you," Kame said. "If you want."

"With magic?"

"Yeah. But not in the middle of the street."

Using magic to break a lock in a dim hallway was one thing. Standing in full view of half a dozen buildings while effecting repairs was quite another. Attitudes to magic varied greatly throughout the country, with the southern towns being far more open and accepting of mages than anywhere else.

Too bad Kame was headed north.

There was only one way out of town and they took it together, slipping furtively through the rusted metal gates to reach the road. The guard at the gatehouse gave them no trouble, snoring peacefully at his station with an empty wine bottle beside him. Kame was tempted to take his lantern - the light from within the town walls wouldn't see them very far into the night. He never usually bothered with one himself, but for the first time in ages, he had company.

Still, that didn't give him an excuse to turn thief. Abandoning the thought, he continued at Jin's side until they'd gone far enough for the road to disappear in the dark.

Jin broke the silence first. "We should've swiped the guard's lantern, shouldn't we? Can you see anything in this?"

"About as far as the end of my nose."

"This is why I don't travel at night - not unless some kind stranger picks me up."

"I thought you said you weren't in that line of work?"

"I hitch-hike, Kame." Though Jin's face couldn't be seen, Kame could tell by his voice that he felt insulted by the insinuation. "Sometimes people go past in wagons or carriages and they've been travelling for days, so they're bored. If they give me a lift, I sing and play for them on the way. It's a fair trade, and sometimes they have new songs to teach me."

"Sounds like a nice way to travel."

Occasionally, Kame had traded favours for a lift, but since his travels mostly involved searching quietly through the land without drawing attention to himself, the fewer people he spoke to, the better.

"Be nicer if we had some light," Jin said pointedly, just before tripping over a mound in the road.

They weren't going to get much further without one, Kame decided. He didn't like the idea of waiting six hours till the sky began to lighten - especially if some enterprising constable thought to look for the two escapees.

"I can do something about that," Kame said. Or so he hoped. He'd had some trouble maintaining his focus without the ruby. "Close your eyes."

"What, because it's such top-secret magic you're not allowed to show me?" Jin huffed.

"No, it's because I don't want to accidentally blind you."

It was too dark for Kame to tell if Jin had closed his eyes or not, but if he hadn't, it would be his own fault if he was seeing fireworks - or worse, nothing at all - for the next week. Kame's talents didn't extend to curing blindness, and no mage alive had managed to find a cure for stupidity.

Kimura had once described magelights as portable stars. Though a fanciful description, Kame liked it. If one could ever hold a star so small and cool to the touch, a magelight would be it.

Kame stripped off his gloves and held out his left hand, palm facing the sky, and curled his fingers inwards to make a fist, slowly drawing power from the atmosphere as he went to condense into a small ball of heatless light. No wasted energy to burn his skin. He opened his fingers again - cautiously, because he was just as likely to blind himself as anyone else - and breathed a sigh of relief when he found he could look directly at the result without searing pain.

"You can open your eyes again," he said, and when Jin did so, the smile that lit up his face made Kame glad he now had enough light to see by. Such open, unabashed wonder was uncommon on the face of a man who looked to be around Kame's own age, in his mid-twenties; a child's innocent joy and surprise made adult by a man's body. "Here - catch!"

Jin's wonder morphed into alarm as he scrambled to catch the magelight. He looked down at his cupped hands, experimentally closing his fingers around the ball to create flickers.

"It doesn't burn!"

"If it burned, it wouldn't be much help, would it?" Kame pointed out. "Since one of us is going to have to hold it while we walk."

"You can't make it fly?"

Kame turned away so Jin couldn't see him giggling to himself. "Making it fly isn't a problem. Making it stop, on the other hand..."

The other reason Kame's mentor had dubbed the magelights 'portable stars' was that the first time Kame had tried to make one fly, he'd sent it high enough in the sky that it had disappeared forever into a sea of stars, off to join its brethren. He wasn't much for the concept of moderation.

"I guess it's not so bad to hold it." Jin tossed it up and caught it a couple of times. "It feels like thick air."

"That's really all it is. There's magic in the air, and I've condensed a small portion of it into a ball and made it glow."

"Magic's got a lot of uses, huh?"

 _More than you could ever imagine._ "It comes in handy sometimes," Kame said, underplaying for all he was worth. "You want to carry it?"

Jin did, and so they followed the road by magelight. Kame didn't have a map but he knew how to find his way north; Jin was amenable to this plan since the route would take them through Sendai, where the Bardic Guild held its trials twice a year.

"And this time, they'll let me in," Jin vowed. "I won't hold back."

"How many times have you tried?"

"Um..." Jin paused for so long Kame thought he must've been trying since he was a mere child, to have to think that far back, but then he smiled sheepishly and said, "Actually, just once."

"You had to think that hard, and it was just once?"

"It was a very traumatic experience," Jin defended himself.

"Do you at least remember why they failed you last time, so you don't do the same thing again?"

"I didn't know you had to be proficient on more than one instrument - it was in the small print somewhere. I'm covered now."

The guitar was a given, but what could the other one be? Kame thought maybe a harmonica or something equally small that Jin could stash in his bag. Lutes, flutes and fiddles were more traditional for bards, of course, but Jin clearly wasn't setting out to be a traditional bard. "So what's your other instrument?"

Jin tossed Kame the magelight to hold and from the side compartment of his bag, extracted two short wooden sticks and held them out for inspection.

"Claves?" Kame guessed, wondering if the Bardic Guild would even allow them to qualify.

"Drumsticks," Jin corrected him, waving them under his nose so he could see for himself that they were longer and thinner than claves.

"And the drums to go with them are...?"

"They'll have at the trials," Jin muttered.

He packed the drumsticks away again and snatched back the magelight, letting his fingers brush against Kame's and generating a tingle that made Kame glad he'd left his gloves off.

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how Jin had managed to achieve proficiency with the drums if he didn't have any - and why he'd chosen such an unwieldy second instrument in the first place - but Jin didn't look like he was in the mood to talk anymore and it was never a good idea to annoy the guy holding the light.

Besides, standing around chatting wouldn't get them anywhere, and they had a lot of walking to do. Kame had intended to resupply before setting out in the morning - his provisions were low, and he didn't know about Jin's. He'd have to do it in the next town.

They followed the road in a comfortable silence, occasionally broken by the sounds of Jin trying to compose lyrics for a song detailing his time spent behind bars. Never mind that he'd been in prison for less than an hour - everything, he said, was good material for a song. Kame helped by contributing the occasional memory, exaggerating the decrepit state of the beds and the cramped, confined conditions of their shared cell. Jin promised to give him partial credit when he got around to finishing it.

Jailhouse rock aside, they didn't talk much, which Kame figured was the safest way to go. The less he spoke, the less he'd reveal about himself.

By the time the sun started to rise, Kame had extinguished the magelight and the next town was in sight - a dot on the horizon. Jin suddenly pulled away from the road and dropped down to the ground.

"If you're going to take a comfort break, at least go behind a bush," Kame said.

Jin laughed and pulled a water bottle from his bag. "Here; my last one. I think we could both do with a drink, and I want to watch the sunrise."

Sunrise meant different things to different people. To Kame, it meant a fresh start, a replenishment of the magic in the atmosphere brought by morning's light. As a mage, he appreciated its purpose.

And as a man, he appreciated its beauty.

He sat down beside Jin to watch the slow, gradual unfurling of a banner of light across the sky, a patchwork of gentle pinks, yellows and blues.

"Lovely, isn't it?" Jin said, handing Kame the bottle after he'd had a swig himself. "I'm not a morning person but sights like this make the idea a lot more appealing."

Kame wiped the neck of the bottle and took a long gulp of water, glad they were near enough to civilisation to resupply soon. "I can think of worse ways to start my day."

"Like waking up in jail?" Jin suggested, making them both laugh.

"I wish I'd had the opportunity to wake up," Kame said. "I was just about to get some sleep when they threw you in there." He yawned, all the tiredness catching up with him now he'd stopped to rest. "It's been a long night. Maybe we can rent a room for a few hours and get a little sleep before we move on."

"If we rent _one_ room for a couple of hours you know what it'll look like, don't you?"

"Two rooms," Kame amended, though in truth he felt it would make very little difference unless Jin snored. "But any place that would rent rooms by the hour wouldn't care what we did with them, anyway."

"And the bed would probably be just as sturdy as the ones in that jail cell. Good thing I can sleep almost anywhere."

A useful skill, to be sure, but Kame hadn't expected Jin to give him a demonstration on the spot. The aspiring bard slumped down, eyes closed, crossing his arms under his head and almost rolling backwards as he straightened his legs.

"If you go to sleep now, I'm going to finish what's left of your water," Kame said. "And then I'm going to move on without you."

That made Jin sit up in a hurry. He gave Kame a dirty look and stole the bottle back. "Don't you dare, after I was nice enough to share with you."

As a peace offering, Kame rummaged around in his bag till he came up with the last of his food - a couple of slightly battered onigiri. He handed one to Jin and started unwrapping the other one himself.

"Here: breakfast."

"You had food all this time and you didn't tell me?"

Kame shrugged. "This is the last of it. I didn't know how long it would take us to get somewhere I could resupply." He watched Jin's onigiri disappear at surprising speed. "When did you last eat?"

"Sometime yesterday morning?" Jin wolfed down the last bite. "I usually sing for my supper, but getting arrested put paid to that."

He stared at the empty wrapper so forlornly that Kame wished he had more food to offer. Unfortunately, conjuring it from the air wasn't an option - at least, not at present - and while Kame's toothpaste had a very pleasant strawberry flavour, it couldn't be considered edible by any stretch of the imagination.

There was one thing he could offer, though.

"I can try fix your guitar string for you now, if you want."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. But no guarantees - you should still buy some spares."

Jin patted his pocket ruefully. "Unless you manage to fix the string, I'm not sure I'll be able to afford spares. Busking doesn't always go so well when I'm just singing.

"I normally play evenings at inns for bed and board," he explained, "but I don't make much money out of it. During the day I find myself a good spot on the streets to play, somewhere like a market, where you've got a lot of people who've got time to stop and listen...and money too, hopefully.

"Guild members can set their own prices, and they get hired by nobility to play private parties and stuff. Did you ever see a broke bard? Nope, me neither. But guys like me, we have to make do with what we can get, try to build a name for ourselves with just our music, without the Guild backing us."

"Is that why you want to join?" Kame asked. "The money?"

"The money would be nice, yeah...but mostly...I just want to prove I can do it, you know? I want them to acknowledge that I'm just as good as any of them, even though I'm doing things my own way."

Jin's ambition found a kindred spirit in Kame. "I know the feeling," he said, and grinned. "Pass the case."


	2. Chapter 2

With his guitar restored to full working order, Jin felt confident he could persuade the landlord of 'The Prancing Penguin' to give them bed and board till tomorrow morning, as both men were in need of a rest and not inclined to move on till then. The inn was not yet open for business but the staff were already bustling around in preparation, and Jin had no trouble talking his way inside.

Kame didn't stay for the audition. He arranged to meet Jin outside the inn afterwards, and left before he could offer to pay for the room. It was never a good idea, he'd found, to let anyone know how much money you happened to be carrying. People got _ideas_.

New town, new territory, but Kame followed the same routine as always. He didn't expect to find what he was looking for - not until he was north of Sendai, at least - but he might find someone who could confirm he was heading in the right direction.

After all, dragons were hardly a common sight.

A dozen towns ago, the Guildhalls had been practically palatial, with gold vine leaves curling around marble pillars and luxurious rooms where petitioners could make their requests in comfortable decadence. But that was further south, where familiarity with magic was bred from birth and mages were warm, jovial family members, albeit the eccentric aunts and uncles whose reactions you could never quite predict.

Up here in Fukushima, Kame suspected, they were more like the disreputable cousins you didn't invite to the family reunion, but secretly hoped would turn up anyway because they were more fun than the rest of your relatives.

He stared at the converted tavern in dismay. The Guildhall's origins were only too obvious, the tankard on the original sign still peeking out from under the heart wrapped in gold vine leaves, the emblem of the Mages' Guild.

Despite his misgivings Kame found, as he approached the doors, that the building hadn't held up too badly. None of the wooden steps were missing, and if they could've done with a good sanding, at least they appeared free from human stains. Someone had painted all the external window frames a cheery purple, which would've been charming if only the painter's definition of "purple" hadn't extended from "lilac" all the way up to "indigo", with no two windows painted alike.

But when a dark-haired, dark-robed young man crashed through the doors and barrelled straight into Kame, he could've come directly from the Guildhall's less than salubrious past.

Kame lost his footing on the steps, stumbling backwards till he met the floor; the stranger landed squarely on his stomach, knocking all the breath out of him with an unfortunately-placed knee. Both men groaned - one in pain, one in annoyance - and Kame did his best to curl up into a ball with an unwanted visitor sitting on his middle.

The last thing he wanted was to get caught up in an early-morning brawl. Last night had been bad enough.

"Sorry," the stranger mumbled, sounding less drunk than Kame had expected. "Those idiots don't stop to check before they throw someone out the doors."

He rolled off Kame, who scrambled to his feet before anyone else could land on him and started brushing himself off.

"Here, let me get that." Kame's unwitting attacker swept the back of his coat clean. "I'm sorry. Are you okay, Mr...?"

"Kame. Just Kame," Kame said shortly.

"Then I'm just Koki," the other man said. "Koki Tanaka. Are you here to make a petition? Because I could owe you a freebie for knocking you down like that."

Kame hooked the slender gold chain from below the neckline of his shirt and pulled it out to show Koki the vine-wrapped heart on the end. Koki grinned sheepishly and stuck out his left forearm, where the same emblem was inked into the skin, the vines curling down to encircle the wrist as well.

"They said it was membership for life," he explained, "so I figured, why not?"

Kame's new acquaintance insisted on taking him inside and buying him a drink as an apology; he assured Kame that the two women who threw him out the doors earlier were simply angry ex-girlfriends and would not present any further problems, as they were now preoccupied with each other. Kame let himself be shown into the taproom, where the bar was maintained around the clock but no alcohol would be served until lunch, and accepted a tall glass of something fruity and unpronounceable. He'd come here to talk, after all, and Koki seemed friendly enough.

It wasn't as if there were many other options available. An elderly mage slumped over his breakfast in a corner of the room, seemingly incapable of eating and breathing at the same time, never mind talking. The bartender only looked up from her Sudoku book when her services were required, and a scowling cook occasionally stuck his head out from the kitchen in the back to check that nobody needed him to do anything.

"This town doesn't have many morning people?" Kame guessed when he and Koki were settled at a small table.

"All the morning people have gone for a run," Koki said. "We don't get many petitioners anyway, so mostly, mages just trickle in through the day to talk shop and prop up the bar when they're not busy.

"We don't get too many new faces, either."

Kame tried to gauge Koki's tone. It wasn't hostile, not really wary...more curious than anything else. If outsiders weren't welcome, he'd hardly have been invited in for a drink. Guild membership didn't always equal acknowledgement, much less welcome.

"I'm not planning on staying long," Kame said. "Just the one night."

Koki pointed to a door at the back. "We've got a few rooms, if you need one. No charge for Guild members, but you have to do something to help out with the repairs before you go."

Repairs? The place didn't look that bad. Maybe they wanted someone to redo all the purple windowframes. (Not that doing so with magic guaranteed they'd all end up the same shade.)

Kame sipped his drink, found it a trifle too sweet, and gave Koki a polite smile. "I think I'm sorted for accommodation, but thanks for the offer."

"Suit yourself." Koki leaned back on his chair, tipping two legs off the floor. "But you'll have better company here than anywhere else in town."

He said it with such confidence that Kame had to laugh, though not mockingly. It was important to have confidence in oneself - for a mage, doubly so, because if you didn't believe you could do it, the odds were good you'd never be able to.

"Got the company sorted too, but again, thanks for the offer," Kame said, and Koki laughed with him.

"Can't blame a guy for trying. Like I said, it's not often we get handsome strangers round here."

"And your two ex-girlfriends threw you out the doors because...?"

"Because they don't like my taste in music," Koki said. "They thought the lyrics were obscene or something."

He stripped off his oversized robe to reveal tight black pants and a sleeveless black leather vest that left very little to the imagination, adorned with enough gold jewellery to satisfy a king. (Kame had a fondness for accessories himself, but Koki clearly had the lead on him.) Fortunately, he didn't seem inclined to remove any more layers, though Kame wouldn't have objected too strenuously. Nothing wrong with enjoying the view.

Kame enjoyed the view a lot more than he enjoyed the song, once Koki burst out into a little number he later told Kame was called 'Make U Wet'. The dance moves were interesting, to say the least.

"I think I can see why those girls are now your exes," Kame said afterwards. "And are you sure you're in the right Guild?"

Koki snorted. "You think the Bardic Guild would take me? I'd give them all heart attacks at the trials.

"Besides, who ever heard of a bard using magic?"

"Who ever heard of a mage singing about someone's 'secret point'?" Kame countered, hoping his face wasn't too red. (It had taken him a minute to fathom out the lyrics, but he was pretty sure he knew what the song was all about and it had nothing to do with watering parched plants.)

Because magical ability was innate, even if the talent to wield it properly wasn't, anyone identified as a potential mage tended to focus on that ability to the exclusion of all others. Why be a carpenter when you could have the power to destroy a building?

"It's just a hobby," Koki said, colouring a little himself. "I'm not cut out to be a greybeard."

"Neither's the guy I'm travelling with," though Kame thought facial hair would suit Koki better than Jin, "but he's still trying out. Trials are all next week, in Sendai."

For a second, Koki looked interested, giving Kame a calculating look; then the interest faded out and he sat down, slipping back into his robe.

"Maybe. But they need me here right now."

"Because you're all rushed off your feet with petitions," Kame said sarcastically, gesturing to the the sleeping mage in the corner.

"Not the petitions - the repairs, and we'll start on those at ten when everyone else gets here. When you got into town, did you feel any wards protecting the perimiter?"

Kame thought back, but the only thing on his mind at the time had been Jin clinging to him in terror as a wasp flew past them just before they reached the gates. He'd been too busy laughing to check for anti-intruder measures. Part of the job of every branch of the Mages' Guild was to create wards to protect their towns from harm, but they'd only activate if someone with evil intentions tried to breach them. Kame's intentions might've been a bit mean at the time (Jin had a real bee in his bonnet about insects) but they weren't anywhere near serious enough to trigger a response.

"None. Should I?"

"Not right now," Koki said grimly. "The latest patch didn't hold. We had a dragon come through here about a year and a half ago, destroyed half the town and sucked all the magic out of the wards. The physical repairs had to take priority - people have to have somewhere to sleep - so we haven't been able to do as much about the wards as we'd like."

Dragon. It had to be. The timing was right.

"This dragon," Kame said. "Did it have black scales?"

"Yeah."

"With red trim?"

"Y...eah."

"And gold talon-sheaths?"

"Why do I get the feeling you're not just guessing blind?"

Kame toyed with his tiny pink cocktail umbrella, opening and closing it in quick succession. "Did it continue north?"

"This a friend of yours or something?"

 _Hardly._

"Please, Koki."

Koki sighed and said, "Yeah, it went north from here, and I hope it stays up there because if it ever decides to come back down, we'll be rebuilding for the next century or so."

"It won't return," Kame said.

"How can you be so sure?"

Kame snapped the cocktail umbrella completely in two. "Because I'm going to kill it."

\-----

Koki had been polite enough not to ask Kame to elaborate further, and Kame wouldn't have, even if he'd been asked. Only the very brave or the very stupid hunted dragons: he didn't feel much like the former and didn't like to give people the impression he was the latter.

For mages in particular, hunting dragons counted as rank stupidity. Dragons couldn't use magic in the atmosphere...but they could steal it the moment someone else drew it out to use in a spell.

While Kame didn't necessarily have to kill the dragon, he didn't for one moment think it would let him leave with the ruby. Even if it did, there was no guarantee it wouldn't take it back, swiping off his head in the process with a careless talon. He didn't plan to let his precious focus be stolen a second time.

Of course, first he had to find the dragon.

When Kame returned to the Prancing Penguin he found Jin on the steps outside, chatting up a rosy-cheeked serving girl. She scurried away as Kame approached, leaving Jin holding a mug of tea.

"You look very pleased with yourself," Kame said. "Did the landlord like your music?"

"I think he might've liked me, actually. Trixie's been telling me-" Jin cut himself off and grinned. "Ah, never mind that. We've got a room - I even managed to get us one with two beds."

Probably just as well. Kame didn't need the distraction.

"Did you find the Mages' Guildhall?" Jin asked.

"How did you...oh." Kame hastily tucked his chain back under his shirt. He hadn't told Jin where he was going. "Yeah, I found it. When are you performing?"

"Six till nine, an hour's break, then ten till midnight. I don't know what time you want to leave in the morning, but I'm going to need at least six hours of sleep or I won't get very far."

"Wimp," Kame teased. "Are you going to have a nap now, then?"

Jin shook his head. "I'll have to go find myself a spot in the market soon, while it's still early, or all the prime locations will be gone by the time I wake up." He stifled a yawn and added, "I'll catch a few hours this afternoon. If you want to go up, though, it's the one with the duck painted on the door. I've got a second key for you."

He passed Kame the key; sure enough, a tiny yellow duck dangled from the end.

Kame's own tiredness had mostly disappeared, thanks to the temporary sugar high he'd received at the Guildhall. "I've hit my second wind," he said. "I'm more interested in finding something to eat."

"A man after my own heart."

Jin took him inside, passing straight through to the kitchen to deposit his mug, and introduced him around to the staff. Despite the inn not yet being open for business, the kitchen was a hot, crowded hive of activity, filled with the scents of freshly baked bread and lemony soap suds.

One of the girls took a fancy to Kame and insisted on personally slicing and buttering as many pieces of bread as he wanted, offering him jam and honey and a few other things that couldn't be mentioned aloud but had to be whispered in his ear. Kame blushed and took the jam, only.

"Are you a musician too?" the cook cooed at him. "Will the two of you be performing together? Because a nice bit of fanservice really gets the crowds in."

Everyone suddenly stopped talking at once, as Kame and Jin gave each other awkward "are we supposed to laugh at this?" glances across the table. The silence lasted until one of the hooks embedded in the wall came loose, sending its copper pot hurtling towards the floor and making them all jump.

"I like to sing but I'm not a musician," Kame said, still not looking at the cook, and they left him alone after that.

"You didn't tell me you liked singing," Jin said. "I thought mages didn't bother with anything artistic."

"Everyone needs a hobby."

"Your hobby is my life." Jin pocketed a napkin-wrapped roll he'd wheedled out of the staff and rose to leave. "If you're not busy, why don't you come with me for a bit? Maybe I'll sing something you know."

Kame had accomplished his mission, as far as this town was concerned. Koki had given him all the painful details of the dragon's visit, enough for him to be sure the ruby had gone north. If he'd been alone, he'd have foregone the room and moved on, but under the circumstances...

"Might as well get a sneak preview for tonight," Kame said, and grabbed a roll of his own.

\-----

Brightly coloured stalls stretched across the square as far as the eye could see, sellers making their final preparations or already serving their first customers. It didn't surprise Kame to see a toy stall selling dragons with detachable heads: even kids had to take out their frustration somehow.

"It's our number one seller," the vendor explained when Kame took a closer look. "Right up there with these T-shirts."

"'I survived the dreaded dragon'," Jin read from a shirt sporting a fearsome-looking beast. "What dragon?"

"I'll explain later," Kame said, taking Jin by the elbow to steer him away from the stall. "Where do you want to set up?"

"Near the food."

"Why am I not surprised?"

One corner of the marketplace appeared to be given over to food stalls; some enterprising soul had set up a dozen picnic tables opposite and Jin found himself a clear patch between them, close enough to the rest of the market that he wouldn't miss the human traffic. His plaid blanket, Kame noted, matched his hooded cloak, and it was big enough for the two of them to sit on without him getting hit in the face by Jin's guitar.

"I saw a stall where I can buy new strings," Jin said. "At some point."

He produced a black fedora, which he turned up on the blanket, ready for any monies the listening public felt inclined to contribute. Kame resolved to slip a little in when Jin wasn't looking, just for encouragement.

"I checked: I don't need a licence to busk here. Some places make you pay for one in advance."

Kame nodded, like this all made perfect sense to him. He hadn't paid much attention to buskers since he'd started tracking the dragon - hadn't had the time to stop and enjoy the music.

Or anything else, for that matter.

Would it be so bad to take one day off and do something for himself?

"Whatever you're thinking about, stop it," Jin ordered. "You'll scare people off with the weird faces you're making."

Kame pulled one last face, sticking out his tongue at Jin, and decided that today would be his day off. Jin batted him over the head in retaliation - fortunately, not with the hand holding the neck of his guitar.

As the market came to life, Jin began to play, easing shoppers into their morning with gentle ballads and bright eyes that soon lost their weariness. Kame wasn't sure where the hip rolls were supposed to come into it. Jin remained firmly seated on his blanket, guitar in his lap, voice sweet but strong and with just a touch of roughness around the edges; from smoke or hard living, Kame couldn't tell.

At first, no one paid them any heed. Then a pair of young women, stopping to buy fresh pastries for breakfast, passed them on the way to the picnic benches. Jin spotted them, started improvising lyrics about how their smiles looked like sunshine. Had to be improvisation; Kame didn't know the song but he knew mischief when he heard it. The pastries must've been long cold by the time the women left, and Jin's hat held a trio of shining silver coins.

"Three?" Jin queried. "I'm sure they only gave me one each."

Kame grinned furtively, glad he hadn't lost the knack for sleight of hand. "One extra for luck?"

Even though it hadn't been for luck, as a ploy it worked a treat. Most people didn't stop for more than half a song, if that, but no one walked away without a smile, even if they'd been sour before. They even got a few sweets when a family paused to listen and Jin proved to have a real talent for entertaining children. Kame got a share of the sweets too, even though his only contribution so far had been to go refill Jin's water bottles for him.

"I like having the company," Jin explained in between songs. "People come and go - I'm the only constant when I do this. If I stop to think about it, I get lonely."

"You told me to stop thinking - may I suggest you do the same?"

"I wish I could, sometimes. Settle down, do something boring that I don't have to think about too much, start a family..."

"I think you'd be a great father," Kame said. "You were terrific when that little girl tripped over right in front of you. I think she wanted to trade you for her own parents."

"I don't want to be a dad who never sees his kids, though," Jin said sadly, "and that means I'd either have to take them on the road - no life for a kid - or put down roots. I like the idea of having somewhere to go home to, but I'd wither away if I didn't have the freedom to move."

Kame liked kids too, but his situation was even worse than Jin's, bearing in mind that within the year he planned to be either a dragonslayer or dead - preferably the former, but it depended on the dragon. In either case, forming attachments was probably a bad idea.

"Enough depressing talk," Jin decided, suddenly rising to his feet. "Let's wake people up."

The next song, Kame didn't know, but the market crowd sure seemed to like it. As Jin sang, "All or nothing, now or never, we can make it happen we can make it all right..." person after person approached them to toss coins in the fedora.

Some of them, Kame noted, weren't even stopping to listen. He met the eyes of their latest benefactor, a richly-dressed man leaning heavily on a cane, and found them blank, unseeing.

 _Just like the guard..._

And where previously they'd received a mix of copper and silver coins, mostly copper, they now had gold coins only, one after another till the hat was filled to the brim.

Jin caught Kame staring at the hat and laughed. "When I called the song 'Gold', I had no idea it was going to be so accurate!"

"'Gold'," Kame repeated. "That's the title?"

"Yeah. It doesn't usually have that effect on people, though." Jin dropped down next to the hat and whistled. "I don't think I'm going to have to worry about affording those spare strings. I could buy myself a music shop with all this!"

"Or at least a drumkit," Kame said absently. His mind was otherwise engaged.

He couldn't figure it out. Had Jin bespelled the shoppers, making them donate whether they wanted to or not? They'd looked as entranced as the prison guard, every last one of them blank. But it couldn't have been magic - the anti-magic field around the jailhouse proved that. And Jin had denied being able to use magic anyway.

"Are you sure you're not a mage?" Kame asked, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.

"If I could use magic, I wouldn't have been thrown in jail in the first place - I'd have zapped the constable!"

"It doesn't work quite like that..."

"Shame," Jin said. "But I didn't do anything - if people like my music and want to give me money, that's great, but you can't force someone to fake enjoyment...can you?"

Kame shook his head. "It's not a practice the Mages' Guild encourages."

He wasn't sure what the Guild would make of Jin. If it wasn't magic, could it be some sort of hypnosis? If so, should Jin be trying to join the Therapists' Guild?

"It's not a practice I like the idea of, either." Jin opened his guitar case. "I think our work here is done, Kame. Give me a hand?"

It didn't take long to pack everything away. The seams of Jin's bag didn't like the weight of all the coins, so the two of them hit the market, guitar case slung over Jin's shoulder and the blanket rolled up under Kame's arm, to change up some of the smaller denominations.

Jin took the opportunity to buy spare strings and stock up on supplies. Kame did the same, not realising Jin was staring at him until he'd finished paying for a multipack of energy bars.

"What? Do you think I shouldn't get the strawberry ones?"

"Magic must pay well, huh?" Jin said. "I haven't seen a wallet that stuffed since the last time I met a full bard."

"I'll pay you for my share of the room," Kame offered, tongue tripping slightly over his words. He hadn't meant to let Jin see. "There's no reason you should have to play for both of us."

Jin waved away the offer. "I'll take you up on it when this lot runs out." He patted his bag. Of course for me to do that, you'll have to still be around, and since you've now repaired my string as promised..."

He looked hopefully at Kame from under his hat, which he'd now reclaimed for its original purpose, and Kame couldn't think of a good reason for them to go their separate ways the next morning. Furthermore, he found he didn't even want to think of one.

"I can't make any guarantees," he warned Jin. "I'm looking for someone, and if I find he's changed course along the way, I'll have to go.

"But if you don't mind the company, I'll go with you to Sendai and cheer you on at the trials.

"Because if I stop to think about it, I get lonely too."

Jin's gleeful little "Yay!" evoked a feeling Kame was loathe to call giddiness, though he had no better name for it. As long as Jin was safely out of the way before Kame found the dragon, there should be no harm in them travelling together for a little while.

Resupplied, they returned to the Prancing Penguin for a rest. Kame attempted to unlock their room with the duck keyring rather than the key itself, a sure sign his second wind was just about out of puff.

"I think it works better if you don't use the beak," Jin said.

"This from the guy who almost put his hat on without removing the money first."

Jin shrugged. "Force of habit. I'd have noticed eventually."

As inn rooms went, it wasn't the best Kame had ever stayed in but it was by no means the worst, even if it was mostly done up in shades of yellow. There didn't seem to be any danger of the beds collapsing, at least, and even if they did, the carpet looked relatively comfortable. And clean, which made Kame's inner neat-freak dance with joy.

Jin removed his shoes, set his bag down by the bed nearest the window and peered out at the street below.

"We've got a nice view of a construction site," he said without enthusiasm.

"Probably more post-dragon rebuilding." Kame set his own bag down next to Jin's, keen to get some organisation going. "Looks like it used to be a Guildhall."

"You were going to explain to me about the dragon."

"Aww, you want a bed-time story?"

"In the middle of the day? Sure."

"I have to warn you," Kame said as he settled himself down on one of the beds," I've been told I'm not much good at telling stories."

"If you were, you'd be the one wanting to join the Bardic Guild," Jin pointed out. "It's okay, I'll put up with your amateur attempts."

"You're too kind."

Kame started off by relating everything he'd heard from Koki. That was the easy bit, the story that wasn't his. Jin listened patiently, eyes closed and head on pillow, only the occasional interjection letting Kame know he was still awake.

"The dragon went north from here," Kame finished.

"Which is what you're doing," Jin said, rolling onto his side to give Kame a speculative look. "Why are you so interested in this dragon, Kame?"

"Because it stole something from me."

Either Kame could explain the whole painful truth, which would get him kicked out of this particular town if anyone happened to overhear, or he could start with the ruby and hope Jin wouldn't ask what preceded it. He'd never told anyone that part, about how responsibility for the damage dealt by the dragon could be laid at his door.

Jin seemed to sense that Kame had conflicting feelings battling it out inside him because he didn't press, just offered an encouraging smile.

The smile lasted for all of about two minutes, at which point he gave up on patience. "Whatever you've got to say, I'll listen," he said. "How about this: you tell me something awful and I'll tell you something worse, story for story."

"You're an aspiring bard; you have an unfair advantage when it comes to stories."

"This isn't one I'd want to sing about."

"You could probably make a decent song out of mine," Kame said. "A warning tale for young mages to teach them what _not_ to do.

"About two years ago I was living with my mentor in the far south, on the island of Kyuushu. He'd invited me to study with him after I helped him out of some trouble when he visited Tokyo, and since my parents couldn't afford to pay a mage to teach me properly, they jumped at the chance for free tuition. I spent seven years learning from Kimura; when he judged I was ready he sent me back to Tokyo, where they hold the trials for the Mages' Guild."

"Which you obviously passed."

"I passed, but Kimura asked me to come back and stay for a while. He had something he wanted to try, and it took more than one mage." Kame shrugged. "He was a nice guy and I learned a lot from him; we didn't see eye-to-eye on everything but we were friends and I was happy to help him out.

"I didn't realise the spell he wanted to try was illegal."

"There are illegal spells?"

"Lots of them. Working transformative magic on living creatures is the one most people get caught for, but as a rule, anything that makes someone do something against their will is forbidden."

"This isn't a terribly traumatic story where you tell me how your mentor bound you to him by magic and used you for his own sinister purposes until one day you finally managed to break free, is it?"

Kame didn't feel in the least like laughing, but did so anyway. "No, it's a terribly traumatic story where I tell you how my mentor asked me to help him summon a demon."

Jin jerked on the word 'demon', knocking the small side pillow off the bed. He didn't appear to notice. "What for?"

"Knowledge. Power. They're the same thing, really. Demons are creatures who live outside time, who know everything from the past, present and future all at once - and they're willing to share that information, if you make it worth their while."

"W-what do they want?" Jin stuttered.

"Experience. They _know_ everything...except how it feels. It's all academic to them. They've never eaten a delicious meal, or shared a bottle of wine with a friend, or kissed someone they love.

"My mentor told me there are two ways to pay for a demon's knowledge. The safest way is to let them steal a memory from you, or from someone else who's had the experience they want. You'll never remember it again, not that particular memory, but I suppose it's not so drastic, forgetting the one time you ate a cheesecake or something.

"The other way is to give them a body." Kame shivered despite the midday warmth and contemplated sliding under the blankets. He didn't think they'd do much for this type of chill, though. "They don't have their own. Give them a body and they can have all the experiences they want."

"You're not talking about building a golem, are you?"

Kame shook his head.

"I was afraid of that. Which did your mentor choose?"

It didn't take a mindreader to know Jin's thoughts. His hands clutched the edge of the blanket hard enough to turn the knuckles white; wide, dark eyes shone with worry, searching for reassurance in Kame's face. Kame suppressed the urge to lean across the gap between their beds to wrap his fingers around Jin's in a silent thank you.

"He wasn't planning on offering up my body to host a demon," Kame said quietly. "He'd intended to donate one of his own memories - not that it made any difference, in the end."

Jin loosened his deathgrip on the blankets. "Then what did he need you for?"

Everyone talked about forbidden magic, naturally. They all said how disgusting it was, and how disturbing, and how of course, they'd never, ever, practise it themselves. It made a good topic of conversation between mages at dinner parties. Nobody ever talked about it in detail, but everyone knew a little something about how it was done.

And Kimura had known it all.

"To summon a demon - or anything else - you have to do two things," Kame explained. "Call it to you, and hold it long enough to make an offer. The more powerful the creature, the stronger you have to be to hold it; for something like a demon, it's safest to have one mage hold and one mage question. I was supposed to hold it."

"Hadn't you only just qualified?"

"Relatively speaking, yes. I'd been a Guild member for less than a year at that point. It didn't matter; only my ability to use magic mattered, and you'll have to take my word for it when I say I can handle more than you'd think. I used to be able to take more magic from the atmosphere than a dozen mages could've safely wielded, and channel it all into spells without thinking."

"Used to?"

Kame smiled ruefully. "You know anything about magical foci?"

"Enlighten me."

"A focus can be anything - a word, a gesture, an object. Mages use them to concentrate magic, to give it direction. You felt for yourself with the magelight - it's like trying to shape thick air. A focus stops stray sparks from escaping.

"My mentor had a collection of precious stones he'd received as payment for various acts of magic. When I helped him sort them, I tested to see if any of them worked as a focus for me." Kame felt his cheeks grow warm. "I...uh...liked the idea of having a focus I could have set in a necklace or something."

Jin raised a leg, shaking it till his trouser cuff slid up to reveal a thin rainbow band decorating a slender ankle. "You're not the only one who likes to accessorise. Did you find a focus?"

"I'm surprised he let me keep it, but I found a ruby that worked for me. It wasn't perfect - there was a small flaw in the centre - but it served me better than any flawless jewel. The ruby was the only reason I could channel that much magic without burning myself out. I can't do it now."

If he could, taking down the dragon would be no problem. But then, he wouldn't need to retrieve the ruby in the first place. He felt stunted without it; restricted, as though he were able only to lap at drops of rainwater on the ground, where before, he'd been able to immerse himself in the ocean. He didn't expect Jin to understand.

"Kimura's part was to call the demon so he could question it on the whereabouts of a missing friend; mine was to hold it by creating a circle of symbols to keep it inside. I was supposed to draw the circle, then power it by using the ruby to channel magic into the symbols."

"What kind of symbols?" Jin asked.

"All the usual. Shields for protection, open doors for an invitation, the sun for strength, and the name of the creature we wanted to summon. Demons have pictures for names, and this one was horribly complicated."

"So what went wrong?"

"I can't draw," Kame admitted. "Kimura's call didn't reach the demon we were after - it reached a dragon instead. Not a creature from outside of time but a flesh and blood monster from the north, furious that we'd pulled him away from his cosy cave in the mountains. He sucked up all the magic from the circle, took a swipe at my mentor that left him in a coma for three months, and sent me flying. I dropped the ruby; dragons like gemstones, especially when they're set in gold necklaces."

"Aww, he took your magic accessory," Jin sympathised. "Can he use it?"

"The ruby's not magical in itself - he can't drain any magic from it. He might try to use it as a focus himself, if he pulls enough magic from existing spells or mages to feed through it, but I doubt it. It's probably languishing in his hoard somewhere."

"And meanwhile, you're..." Jin trailed off, then started laughing. "I'm sorry; I know it isn't funny, but all this started because _you can't draw_?"

"More or less," Kame huffed, feeling mildly indignant. "When Kimura finally woke up, he didn't see the funny side."

"I'm sorry." Jin bit down on his lip but his chin still wobbled with silent laughter.

"When he'd recovered enough not to need me around anymore, I started following the dragon north - and here I am. I have to get that ruby back."

"Good story! It would make a better ballad if the ruby was a girl, of course, but I can work on that..."

"You are _not_ turning the most excruciating event of my entire life into a song, Jin."

"But that's what I do in songs - I tell stories. Okay, so some of those stories happen to be about spending too much time in bars..." Jin reached down to find the pillow he'd knocked aside earlier. "I can just change the names - no one will know it's you. Hey, I don't even know your real name."

If Jin didn't know already, he either didn't keep up with the news much - unusual for an aspiring bard - or he was just being polite. Kame had been left in the unfortunate position of explaining to Kimura's friends exactly why the poor man was in a coma, and why his house looked like several hurricanes had stopped by for a visit. Word had spread like wildfire after one of the concerned visitors had seen the remains of the circle and realised they'd been attempting forbidden magic. It hadn't taken long to blacken their names with the magical community. If not for their Guild membership giving them quasi-immunity (it was for life, after all) they'd have been spending the rest of their lives inside anti-magic fields.

"It's 'Kazuya Kamenashi'," Kame said, "and my mentor is Takuya Kimura. Sound familiar? Two years ago you couldn't go five minutes without someone gossiping about the scandal."

Jin's expression didn't change. "Sorry; never heard of you. So now you don't tell anyone your name, huh?"

"Our likenesses were never distributed - only people who knew us could make the connection."

It saddened Kame to think that everyone who knew him before, no longer wanted to associate with him - and those who came to know him now had no idea who he was. Still, he'd had the nickname long enough to like it.

"My lips are sealed." Jin pantomimed shooting a bolt across his mouth. "I promise. I'll make up names when I write the song."

"Jin!"

"Just kidding. It would make a great song, but right now it doesn't have an ending."

"It ends when I find the dragon and either get my ruby back so I can repair some of the damage done to towns like this, or he flamebroils me and has me for lunch. Which one do you think would get people singing along?"

"Hmm..." Jin pretended to consider it. "The first one, probably. Of course kids would have more fun with the flamebroiling..." He quit teasing when Kame threatened to throw a pillow at him. "Relax, I'm not going to write about you. What kind of person does something like that to someone who's just trusted him with a secret?"

The reassurance sent the tension fleeing from Kame's body; he hadn't noticed how tight he'd been holding himself till his shoulders slumped against the mattress. Two years was a long time to carry such a weight.

"Thank you," he whispered, not sure if Jin would hear him or not, but Jin smiled and returned the thanks at half the volume. "So now I've told you something awful. What can you tell me that's worse?"

Noon sounded outside, bells distant but audible, and Jin groaned.

"I'm on in six hours. Can I tell you later? I need some sleep or I'll get beer thrown over me tonight."

Kame agreed that this would be undesirable - a waste of good beer, at least - and they lay in silence till sleep claimed them both.


	3. Chapter 3

Kame didn't realise how exhausted he'd been till he woke up the next morning, ravenous and wondering why it was so light outside.

"You let me sleep for eighteen hours?" he said to Jin, who had his face buried in a flannel in front of the mirror.

"You seemed to need it." Jin set the flannel down. "When I woke up yesterday afternoon, you looked so peaceful I thought it would be a pity to wake you up just to see my set. And then during my break I got sidetracked talking with some of the guys downstairs and didn't get a chance to see if you wanted to watch the second half-"

"I see where this is going."

Kame rolled out of bed, stretching out limbs that had had more rest in the last twenty-four hours than in the past week. He couldn't be mad at Jin for letting him sleep, even though he'd been looking forward to seeing the performance.

"Did it go well?"

"Mostly. There were a few technical problems, but nothing major," Jin said.

"Technical problems?"

"A couple of the lanterns died at the same time, a brawl started outside and drowned me out for a while, and when I climbed up on one of the tables to sing, it collapsed. It got me a few laughs, anyway."

He didn't seem any the worse for wear from the table incident, so Kame assumed he'd be okay to travel.

"Did you get enough sleep?"

"Not as much as _some_ people, but enough. We're not going anywhere before we have breakfast, are we?"

"Not if I can help it," Kame vowed.

Within the hour, both men were dressed, fed and ready for travel, having refilled their water bottles and received a kind donation of fresh foodstuffs from the kitchen staff, who'd been most impressed by Jin's performance the previous night. Kame couldn't figure out why the cook kept winking at him and calling him a lucky man, but he wasn't about to turn down free food.

He did feel like a lucky man when a passing merchant offered them a lift to the next town, though. They crammed themselves into the back of the wagon, squeezing between chests filled with fabric, and Kame fought back the urge to buy material for a new wardrobe. He'd lost a lot during the devastation of Kimura's house; no point replacing everything when he didn't plan on sticking around to wear it. Not like he had anyone to dress up for on the road. With Jin swaddling himself up in bulky, shapeless clothing all the time, Kame didn't feel underdressed in the slightest.

Their driver took them straight into town and deposited them in the square, where they took a few minutes to stretch beside the fountain. Kame watched water pour from the open beak of the stone bird in the centre, trying to decide if it was ugly or beautiful. Jin sneaked up beside him.

"I saw you peeking at the silk. Tempted?"

"Not my colour," Kame said airily.

He didn't add that he thought Jin would look better in it. While they'd dressed, he'd caught a brief glimpse of the figure beneath all the layers: not painfully slender but far from chubby, with shapely legs and arms well-suited to carrying travel bags. Perhaps Jin thought dressing to emphasise his physical attributes would be unbecoming to a future bard?

"Well, it would make you look like a duck," Jin said.

Kame thumped him lightly in the ribs and marched off to read the signpost on the other side of the square.

Jin caught up with him in a flash, pretending to be winded. "You're stronger than you look, you know?" he panted.

"If that hurt, you're obviously weaker than _you_ look."

Jin straightened up immediately.

"I'm not seeing a sign for the Mages' Guild," Kame said as he studied the signpost, which bore arrows for over a dozen other choice locations. "Maybe we can ask someone."

"Why do we need to find the Guildhall at all?" Jin asked, puzzled. "All you want to know is if the dragon came this way, right? We could ask anyone in town, as long as they were living here a couple of years ago."

"Nice thought, but non-mages can't tell me whether or not any magic was drained from spells. The dragon might not have passed directly over the town but if he was near enough, he could've stolen magic. A mage could tell me the direction of the pull."

"I feel so enlightened."

They had their pick of residents to ask. It was a little after noon, and people from all walks of life passed through the square. Mothers toting fat, happy babies on their hips. Schoolchildren enjoying their lunches in small groups. Workers popping out to the shops on their midday break.

Kame was about to approach a pair of young women sitting on the edge of the fountain when Jin caught his coat sleeve and tugged him in the other direction.

"Let's ask _him_ ," Jin suggested, pointing to a young, redhaired man strumming a guitar in front of a sweetshop. "He looks friendly."

"I'm not sure if that smile's supposed to welcome people or scare them off." From Kame's perspective, the busker's bright smile could be interpreted either way. Its intensity could not be denied, however. "All right, let's ask him."

This proved easier said than done; no sooner had they begun their approach than a herd of teenage girls appeared from around the corner to form a circle around the busker, all cooing "Ueda-sama!" and fanning themselves with large white fans bearing messages of love.

"Still want to ask him?" Kame said. "Because we might have to crossdress for him to notice us."

Jin shuddered. "He must be pretty well-known around here to have all those devoted fans. Maybe I should ask him for tips."

They ventured closer, seeking a path to see them through the fangirls, none of whom even responded to their presence. Kame tried to talk to one but almost got his eye poked out by a fan.

Hugging the side of the sweetshop got them close enough to pop up next to the busker just as he sang the final few words of a sweet, folksy song about flowers. He had a nasal singing voice - by no means unpleasant, but not, to Kame's ear, as pleasing as Jin's.

"Ueda-sama!" the girls screamed the moment their idol's fingers stilled on the guitar.

"He's good," Jin whispered to Kame. "Very good. But he's not busking. Look; he's not collecting money."

"This lot look more likely to throw themselves at him than money," Kame said. "Maybe he's some rich lord's son, doing this for fun?"

Ueda beamed up at them. "You'll have to whisper more softly if you don't want me to hear you."

Kame couldn't decide if having the full force of that blinding smile on him made him feel more like he'd just seen the sun for the first time after a long night of darkness - or the darkness was coming to get him.

"Sorry about that," Jin said, scratching his neck. "We just wanted to ask you something."

"I don't play private parties," Ueda said. "If you want to join the fanclub, though, I believe the girl in the leather corset handles the membership applications."

"I don't even want to know." Kame was starting to wish he'd asked the women by the fountain after all.

"Then what _do_ you want to know?"

"I'm actually pretty curious about those last couple of chords-"

"Jin!"

At Kame's exasperation, Jin hastily returned to the point. "I mean, do you know where we can find the Mages' Guildhall?"

"In this town? You can't."

"Why not?" Kame looked nervously at the crowd of girls, who weren't happy to see Ueda's time being taken up by a couple of unworthy men. "Is it hidden?"

"If there were any mages left in town, they'd have a Guildhall, but they're all gone now."

It was on the tip of Kame's tongue to ask why, but Ueda pre-empted him, accompanying his own explanation on guitar.

 _"'Twas less than two years ere this day  
We had a winged guest  
With breath of fire and talons sharp  
And strength that none could best.  
A dragon, sure, this creature was  
With scales black as night  
His fierce eyes and pointed teeth  
They gave us quite a fright."_

Kame exchanged looks with Jin. It didn't matter if they couldn't find a mage to talk to - they didn't need one.

 _"But we won't be having magic here no more.  
No, we won't be having magic here no more.  
There'll be naught here to a dragon's taste  
So he won't lay our town to waste  
Now magic's against the law._

Once we had a Mages' Guild  
Of men and women strong  
They used their power recklessly  
Be it for right or wrong.  
All over town, their spells were found  
We thought it would be fine  
But not once did we e'er suspect  
Our lives were on the line.  
One night when all was quiet and still  
The beast flew through the skies  
Seeking tasty magic snacks  
He took us by surprise."

Kame's pendant hung heavy around his neck, hidden by his shirt. He didn't think it would be a good idea to mention his Guild membership here. Long, warm fingers casually brushed his in reassurance; Jin understood that too. He started in surprise when Ueda suddenly switched to rap, delivering the next instalment of his tale in a brutal, rapid burst.

 _"With blazing eyes and fiery breath  
He brought us pain; he brought us death  
Magic was holding up our town  
He drained us dry; our walls fell down  
When he'd had his fill he went on his way  
We're still picking up the pieces to this day"_

No wonder Kame hadn't detected any wards - though they, at least, were non-corporeal. Using magic to hold physical structures together in the long-term was a tricky business and if these people had let their mages do all their construction work for them, the cost of a dragon's flying visit would've been staggeringly high.

 _"But we won't be having magic here no more.  
No, we won't be having magic here no more.  
There'll be naught here to a dragon's taste  
So he won't lay our town to waste  
Now magic's against the law._

Next day the mayor decreed it thus  
A law that none could doubt:  
'Magic only leads to harm  
The mages must get out!'"

Fangirls applauded as Ueda finished, cutting his impromptu performance off sharp.

"And that's why you won't find a branch of the Mages' Guild here," he said. "Will that be a problem?"

Kame hoped he sounded suitably bored. "I figured maybe I could petition someone to get the winestains out of my shirt - the laundry can't seem to shift them - but I guess it can wait for another town."

"We're headed north," Jin added. "Which way did the dragon go? Because if other towns have done the same thing, my friend might as well buy a new shirt instead."

"I believe the dragon also went north, but as I wasn't here at the time, I can't tell you first-hand," Ueda said. "I think you'll be able to find somewhere to take care of your shirt, though. In my experience, most places don't rely on magic to build their houses."

"They'd be fools if they did," Kame said grimly; when Jin's fingers scraped by his again, he figured he'd better shut up and not draw more attention to himself than he could help. The crowd of fangirls looked lethal enough and he had no wish to see what the rest of the town could do to mages who couldn't take a hint.

Jin picked up the slack by commenting on Ueda's mini-rap and suggesting improvements, musician to musician, and somehow got started on a discussion about guitars that Kame couldn't follow to save his life. By the time the two concluded their talk, the girls had given up and moved on and Kame was in the sweetshop, trying to decide on a little something for the road. They certainly weren't going to hang around in this town.

"He seemed nice, even if he can't rap," Jin said, sticking his head inside the shop. "Can we get fudge?"

"Just a little bit. How do you feel about moving on?"

"Let me find a bathroom first and I'm good to go."

Jin ducked out to find the public convenience, leaving Kame to pay for a small bag of chocolate fudge. Horribly impractical, of course, but Jin's smile had been so gleeful when Kame had agreed to the fudge that its unsuitability as travel rations ceased to matter. It was important, Kame thought, to keep his companion in a good mood, given that they would be travelling together for another few days yet.

In his haste to exit the sweetshop, he caught his bootheel on the edge of the welcome mat and tripped out the door, landing awkwardly on the ground outside. He only just managed to get his hands out in time to save his nose from being smashed. The unforgiving ground left scrapes across his palms and dust on his clothes, and he groaned as he pulled himself up to his knees.

"The hospital's about three minutes to your left," Ueda said. He hadn't moved from his position, though he'd progressed as far as opening his guitar case. "If you need those hands looked a-"

"What?"

Kame didn't understand why Ueda had stopped dead until he followed the other man's gaze down to his chest...where his pendant had slipped out during the fall. The gold vine-wrapped heart stood out like a star in the night sky against his black coat.

He held Ueda's gaze in silence, daring him to say something. Surely the worst they could do would be escort him out of town? He hadn't used any magic, hadn't done anything that would attract the attention of a dragon - but then, with no mages left, how would they know that?

A full minute passed. Kame's chest tightened; Ueda reached a hand towards him, caught hold of the chain...and tucked the pendant carefully back where it belonged.

Jin returned just in time to witness this. "What the..."

Ueda gave them a mysterious smile. "I don't live here any more than you do, but this town gave me an interesting story. Good luck with the trials."

He grabbed his guitar and left before Jin could even close his mouth, which was still gaping.

"How..."

Kame shrugged. "You're a musician heading north, and the Bardic Guild trials are next week. Where else would you be going?"

"Maybe I'm taking a holiday and my guitar is my luggage?"

"And that makes me?"

"My devoted stalker?"

"I'm the one with the bag of fudge. You'll be stalking _me_."

Jin conceded that Kame might have a point. They took a few minutes for Kame to straighten himself up and wash his hands - fortunately, none of the scrapes had drawn blood - and then another few minutes because Jin insisted he needed a drink before he moved on, and what with one thing and another it was a good half-hour before they managed to leave. They didn't see Ueda again. Kame kept sneaking nervous peeks over his shoulder, checking for a lynch mob, but no one even looked their way.

Still, it was a relief to be back on the road, and Kame didn't allow himself to relax until they'd been walking for an hour.

"You can breathe again now," Jin said. "I don't think anyone's coming to stab you with a pitchfork. Not that I'd let them get you, anyway."

"You wouldn't, huh?"

"Nope." Jin smirked. "You've still got the fudge in your bag. I'm not handing that over to anyone."

Kame laughed and passed him the sweets.

They didn't have a lift this time, but the path stayed straight and true, leading them towards Sendai - or so Kame assumed, based on the signposts helpfully planted every mile along the road. There didn't seem to be much else out there except trees.

"I think Sendai's our next stop," Jin said. "I don't remember there being anything else nearby."

"Did you come this way before?"

"I was on my way south last time. When the Guild made the enormous mistake of turning me down as a trial candidate, I just kept going; made it as far as Kagoshima before I turned around to head back, with another dozen songs under my belt and a lot more memories than I started with."

"I don't suppose one of those memories includes the location of some shelter?" Kame pointed at the black clouds gathering on the horizon. "Because I think within an hour, we're going to get very wet - and not in a fun way, either."

Jin shot him a look of alarm and peered into the trees. "I wish I had my own wagon. With a retractable roof, and maybe some fuzzy dice, and a nice, comfy bed taking up most of the room in the back."

"Make the bed a bit smaller and you could probably squeeze a drumkit in there," Kame suggested.

Discussion about the interior of Jin's hypothetical wagon carried them off the road and into the woods in search of large trees for shelter. Kame tried to keep one eye on his feet, not wanting to fall flat on his face for the second time that day, and the other on the branches overhead, looking for anything thick enough to form a canopy. By the time they found a likely-looking spot, the wagon had a sunroof, a music box and a luxurious silk interior.

Kame flattened himself under an old oak tree where thick, heavy branches twisted overhead to block out both light and rain, just as the drizzle began. His bag, being completely waterproof, could stand to get a little damp. His hair, not so much. He yanked his coat hood over his head, pulling it as far down as possible to shield his eyes. Jin pressed close, shoulder to shoulder, his own hood covering half his face.

"Is yours waterproof?" Kame asked.

"Only as long as no one tips a bucket of water over my head."

The odds of that happening were slim to none, given that bar the occasional curious squirrel peeking out from the tree trunks, they were all alone.

"I don't suppose you know any magic to control the weather?" Jin said.

"If I make it stop raining here, somewhere in the world they'll have a six-month drought. It's not forbidden but it's not encouraged, either; weather's a tricky business."

Even so, Kame was tempted by the idea. The rain didn't look to be letting up any time soon; they could be stuck under the tree for hours. Though no stranger to spending a night on the road, he'd rather not be trying to sleep out in the cold, damp and dark - especially if Jin was going to make things worse by continually daydreaming about his hypothetical wagon.

They watched the rain splash leaves for a few minutes, and when Jin shivered Kame felt it too.

"I think the trees are thicker over there," Jin said suddenly. "Looks like we'd have more shelter from the wind, too. Want to make a dash for it?"

"I'm game."

The rising wind blew the rain sideways, rendering their tree more or less useless - they could hardly make matters worse by moving. Jin grabbed his bag and guitar case and bolted, but with only the one bag to manage Kame quickly outstripped him, dashing between the trees like a fox on the run, coat flying out behind. Gnarled roots protruded from the ground, half-hidden by sodden grass, intent on tripping them up; Kame jumped as Jin clutched him from behind to regain his balance.

"Careful!"

"Sorry," Jin muttered. "I stepped in a hole."

"It's okay." Kame wouldn't have minded except that Jin's guitar case had whacked him in the shoulder. "It might be drier here but the ground's lethal. Watch your step."

The uneven ground wasn't the only threat. It took standing under the tangled, interwoven branches for Kame to realise the trunks formed a circle - and he and Jin were right in the middle. As a mage, he felt wary in any circle he hadn't drawn himself, even if it was one formed by nature. Circles could keep things out - and keep things in.

Shadows surrounded them on all sides, weak daylight blocked entirely, and then the rain hit. Ice water blew through the trees at every angle, finding the gaps in their clothing and sneaking inside to slither cold trails down their skin. Each drop held the fury of a storm, of a weapon aimed to hurt.

"You had to say it was drier here, didn't you?" Jin dropped his baggage and wrapped his arms around himself, huddling close to one of the larger trees.

"Famous last words." Kame shielded his eyes with one hand while he tried to scan the area. There was definitely something weird about the weather. Storms weren't normally so...directed. "Are you all right?"

"Fine, if you don't count that I'm being beaten up by hailstones," Jin grumbled.

Kame was loathe to suggest moving further into the woods. Although they'd lost sight of the road, he still knew roughly how to find it again. He wasn't sure he could say the same if they went much deeper. Not that they were in a position to continue right now. The weather's persistent attacks drove them closer together, keeping them pinned against the tree.

He had to lean over, tug Jin's hood aside and speak right into his ear to make himself heard over the roaring wind, accidentally brushing his lips against the soft shell. "I don't think I can do much about the weather, but I can try make us a shield to keep the rain out!"

Jin remained oblivious, murmuring softly to himself while streams of water ran from his matted curls into his eyes and mouth. Kame hoped the other man wasn't having a fit. His knowledge of medical magic didn't extend beyond sealing a wound - the one time he'd tried to fix his own broken nose, he'd ended up with a lump his mentor had refused to remove.

Upon closer inspection Jin's murmurs proved to have both a tune and a quiet, steady rhythm. Another song, then. If it was supposed to keep their spirits up, Kame didn't think it was doing its job.

"...I'm dancing in water," Jin finished, then blinked. "Hey, you made the rain stop!"

"It hasn't stopped," Kame pointed out, "it just isn't hitting us anymore. What were you singing?"

"That? Ah, sometimes I sing to make myself feel better. The song's called 'Water Dance', but what's that go to do with anything?"

"It's got _everything_ to do with it because _I_ didn't do anything! Take a look around us."

Rain still poured steadily through the trees, soaking the surrounding area, yet not a drop of it touched either of them. It slid to the side, parting overhead as though Kame had raised an invisible shield. But he'd done nothing, though he felt tired enough, beaten down by the weather, to have attempted a great masterwork of magic. Jin's song, it had to be. First in the prison, then while busking, and now in the woods.

Jin shook his head, sending water droplets everywhere. None of them landed on Kame. "Now you've made us a magic umbrella, we could keep going?"

"I promise you, I didn't do anything. It's your singing, Jin. I don't know what it is, but it's not magic.

"That storm, on the other hand, _is_."

"Magic? The weather? What makes you think so?"

"It wasn't until we entered this circle. I can feel it now; the atmosphere's drained of magic and it's not me using it. I think someone's trying to keep us from wandering any further into the woods. Shall we find out why?"

"Um..."

"Of course if you're scared, we could just prop up this tree for another few hours..."

"I'm not scared." Jin snatched up his bags and glared defiantly at the darkness beyond the circle. "If some mage is out there playing tricks on us, maybe he's got a few dry towels."

He strode forward, forcing Kame to stick close if he didn't want to get wet. Jin's 'Water Dance' evidently allowed him to move through rain without being soaked; the same privilege was only granted to Kame if he remained in close proximity - something he found out the hard way.

Kame tried to muster up enough magic for a magelight, hoping to dispel the gloom, but even outside the ring of trees the atmosphere was depleted. The few flickers he produced lasted mere seconds. Still, the further they walked, the calmer the weather grew, till only a light drizzle remained and Kame knew the bad weather was all natural.

"I hope you remember how to get back to the road," Jin said.

"Maybe the owner of that cabin can tell us."

A small log cabin sat in the middle of a clearing, light shining from the windows and a young man standing at the open front door, watching them with cautious eyes. He didn't look dangerous - to Kame's way of thinking, no one who wore diamond-patterned argyle vests could possibly be dangerous - but didn't rush out to greet them with open arms, either.

"I've never seen a _tengu_ in real life before!" Jin exclaimed, loud enough to reach the cabin.

"Hey!"

"I don't think he likes you making fun of his nose," Kame said. "Perhaps you'd better apologise before he sends more bad weather after us."

"You think this guy's our mystery mage?"

The stranger retreated inside the house, leaving the door wide open in invitation, and Kame grinned.

"Let's go find out."


	4. Chapter 4

To Jin's joy, a stack of dry towels awaited them just inside the door; he all but dived into the pile. Kame retained presence of mind long enough to shut the door behind them and take a look inside. If his suspicions were correct, the mage would do them no further harm, but it never hurt to be cautious.

The small entrance hall led to a surprisingly spacious living room, part of which was concealed by a curtain - a bedroom, Kame presumed. At the other end was a small kitchen unit, and a pair of doors stood closed down the adjacent wall. A roaring fireplace provided welcoming heat, the kind that made Kame want to shuck his dripping clothes, curl up on the soft, wide couch, and take a nap.

He didn't see the owner until the man appeared with a pair of fresh robes.

"I'm sorry about the storm," he said, holding them out to Kame. "I didn't realise you were mages too, or I wouldn't have tried to keep you out."

Kame didn't think this would be a good time to mention that Jin wasn't a mage, and that his ability to dodge the rain wasn't a magically-generated shield. "We won't take it personally, Mr...?"

"Nakamaru," the other mage said. "Yuichi Nakamaru. Are you Guild?"

"I am," Kame pulled out his pendant, relieved when Nakamaru smiled at it, "but he isn't." He indicated Jin, who had his face buried in a towel. That Jin was trying out for the Bardic Guild and not the Mages' Guild was, he felt, irrelevant to the conversation.

"I've got a Guild pin around here somewhere..." Nakamaru rummaged through his desk drawer, emerging triumphant with a vine-wrapped heart small enough to go unnoticed if worn on a shirt collar.

Kame gave a nod of acknowledgement, then winced as Jin sneezed three times in a row. "Would you happen to have any tissues?"

Twenty minutes later, they'd finished with the introductions and established that as Kame had suspected, Nakamaru was one of the mages in Ueda's song, driven out of town after the dragon's visit.

"I'm not sure where everyone else went," he said. "But I wanted to work on spells to help the environment, so living out here in the woods suits me. Do you have any idea of the damage the factories are doing to our world?"

"I'm not sure trying to beat people to death with rain is very environmentally-friendly," Jin mumbled into his teacup. Now dry and robed, he'd wrapped himself up in a blanket, only his face and hands showing over the top.

"Your corpses would eventually return to the planet," Nakamaru assured him.

"How comforting," Kame said.

"I _did_ apologise. I thought you were militia on patrol, trying to keep mages out of the area."

The very idea of either himself or Jin being in the militia brought Kame out in giggles. A pair of drowned rats, more like.

"You can't be too careful," Nakamaru insisted. "I don't want to lose my home again."

"I guess you don't get too many visitors," Jin said.

"Just a few friends who come out to see me when they pass by this way." Nakamaru removed the whistling kettle from the fire. "More tea, anyone?"

Kame held out his cup for a refill. "I hope we're not being too much of an inconvenience."

"It can be nice to see some different faces for a change. Where were you headed before the rain caught you?"

"Sendai." Jin waved his own cup to hint for a refill. He'd finally stopped sneezing. "If we can find the road again."

"If you're not in a great rush, I can show you in the morning," Nakamaru offered. "It's not a good idea to go wandering around the woods after dark."

"It wasn't a great idea in the daylight either..." Jin's free hand emerged from the blanket long enough to swipe a chocolate biscuit from the plate of goodies on the table. "We can definitely wait until morning, if you've got room for us to crash for the night."

"If it's not too much trouble," Kame added. "We can compensate you for-"

"It's fine." Nakamaru waved away all offers of payment. "The couch unfolds into a bed. It's a decent size; hope you don't mind sharing."

"It won't be a problem." At least, Kame hoped it wouldn't be a problem. Maybe if they shared a bed, Jin would be less inclined to let him sleep half the day away.

"Good, because otherwise one of you would have to camp out on the floor in my workroom and I don't think you'd like that."

Nakamaru proved to be a gracious, if slightly awkward host. When the time came to prepare dinner, Kame volunteered to help out, having learned to cook as an unofficial part of his apprenticeship. Jin also volunteered, but the kitchen area wasn't big enough for the three of them and after he'd been told three times to stand somewhere else, he gave up and took out his guitar, playing music to cook by. Kame kept waiting for something weird to happen.

Nothing did.

"He's a bard, isn't he?" Nakamaru asked while Jin was in the bathroom. "I should've guessed earlier."

"Bardic Guild trials are in Sendai in a few days; that's why we're going," Kame said.

"He's trying out; what about you?"

"I'm just going to cheer him on." Kame didn't feel like explaining what he'd be doing afterwards. Travelling with Jin was nice - comforting, even. Having someone to share the journey with made the end look less like certain doom. Shame they'd be parting company in a few days, but Kame couldn't drag his new friend into danger. Not intentionally, anyway. "I'm sure he'll make it in."

After the meal Nakamaru asked for a favour, to which Jin agreed instantly. Kame had a few reservations.

"I'm not sure mixing music and magic is a good idea," he began, but Nakamaru gave him a reassuring smile.

"It'll be perfectly safe. Jin can't use magic, can he?"

"Nope," Jin said cheerfully. "Not one bit. I don't see what's wrong with me playing guitar while you do...whatever it is you're planning on doing."

"Beatboxing. I use the rhythm to craft spells."

Kame figured he and Jin must've been wearing identical blank looks because Nakamaru sighed and offered them a demonstration. Beatboxing had been all the rage a couple of years ago but Kame had never seen it used to focus magic before. It made sense, he supposed. To weave a careful, well-planned spell one had to mold the magic evenly, and a regular beat could only help with that. If not for the fact that Jin used no magic, Kame would've assumed he worked in a similar way.

Clearly, Jin had missed out on the beatbox trend. He clapped like anything when Nakamaru's series of vocal acrobatics produced a pillow from thin air. (As Nakamaru only had one spare pillow, the creation of another had been necessary.)

As a demonstration, it was impressive, but it had been magic - no doubt about it. Kame could feel the atmospheric drain for himself when he reached out.

"I could do with some additional harmony, though," Nakamaru said. "There's something I want to try."

Kame resigned himself to audience status, following the others into the workroom to watch. He didn't get very far inside; paper mountains covered most of the floor space. Jin wound up perched on top of a low bookcase with his guitar, Nakamaru was all but hidden behind a stack of used paper, and Kame figured he couldn't be in the room and breathe at the same time, so he hung back in the doorway.

"You're right; I don't think we'd want to sleep in here," Jin said. "What's with all the paper? Are these your notes?"

"Not exactly." Nakamaru tried to open his arms to gesture, but thought better of it after one of the stacks started to sway. "This is all the paper I've used in the last year, most of it for notes I no longer need. I'm trying to be more economical with paper these days.

"Do you have any idea how much paper is wasted every year? How many trees we use up and never replace, all for something with such limited use?"

"Can't say I've thought about it much," Kame admitted. His lifestyle hardly lent itself to accumulating millions of pieces of paper.

"But I have." Nakamaru looked positively gleeful. "What if we could re-use the paper? Repair it, erase the contents, and leave it fresh and new again? We could recycle it!"

"And you've figured out how to do that with magic?" Kame asked, more out of professional curiosity than anything else.

"I think so. I've tried it on my own but it takes more intense focus than I've got - I start to lose the thread of the spell after about half a sheet of paper. I think having someone else keeping the tune going would be a great help."

Jin looked at Kame and shrugged. "It should be okay, right?"

"Try it and see."

After a few minutes of discussion on rhythm the experiment began: Nakamaru beatboxing in time to Jin's light, melodic guitar. Initially, it was nothing more than a musical collaboration - but when Kame started to feel the little tugs along his skin that told him magic was moving in the atmosphere, he knew he'd see results soon.

And he did, just not the results he'd been expecting.

"At least all the torn and crumpled pieces repaired themselves," Nakamaru said glumly. "And all the writing's gone too. I just don't understand why every last sheet turned purple."

"By any chance, does that pretty tune you were playing have a name?" Kame asked Jin, who'd jumped down from the bookcase to study the paper.

"I call that one 'Murasaki'," Jin said.

Although that explained the purple Kame felt more mystified than ever, which still gave him a lead over Nakamaru, to whom he could only say, "Maybe you can sell it all to women?"

The paper debacle went unresolved, despite Nakamaru theorising aloud for a good twenty minutes until Jin yawned and put on a 'please may I be excused?' face. Kame kept quiet about the other mysterious occurrences; while having another mage to consult would be advantageous, he didn't like the idea of Jin being studied by anyone but him. Whatever he did was clearly unorthodox for a bard, which meant his hopes for Guild membership might be dashed if he was found to be ineligible. Guild membership was for life (though some guilds had far shorter life expectancy than others) and it was better to wait until after you were in to be found disreputable.

Nakamaru retreated behind the curtain to get some sleep, still murmuring theories to himself, so Jin and Kame made up the couch bed, newly-created pillow and all. While not much for luxury, it did fit both of them in relative comfort, and Jin promised to do his best not to take over the entire thing during the night.

"If you push me out of bed I know a hundred ways to make your life a misery," Kame warned. He hadn't shared a bed with anyone in a long time, and rarely with anyone as attractive as Jin; he hoped he didn't end up embarrassing himself.

Jin tugged his side of the blanket up to his chin. "You'd only fall five inches - you wouldn't even notice."

"Do you really want to take that chance?"

"Hmm..." Jin pretended to consider it. "I'll risk it. But I take no responsibility for anything my sleeping body does."

"You don't talk in your sleep, do you?" It occurred to Kame that he'd never been around a sleeping Jin; he'd already been awake by the time Kame had woken up in the Prancing Penguin.

Jin shrugged, his shoulder bumping against Kame's under the blanket. "I wouldn't know; I've never shared with anyone before. But if I do, feel free to talk back."

"I'd prefer it if you didn't," came Nakamaru's voice from behind the curtain, not sounding particularly hopeful.

Kame laughed and snuffed the light with a twitch of his fingers.

\-----

Morning found Kame still in the bed, further from the edge than he'd expected - though this was because he'd moved forwards while asleep. He'd moved forwards, or Jin had moved backwards; maybe both, he wasn't sure. Either way, they'd drifted together during the night, and Kame didn't dare move for fear of waking Jin.

He didn't know how Jin would feel about having Kame's chest pressed against his back, Kame's arm draped loosely over his hip in comfortable, possessive familiarity, Kame's breath ruffling the hair at the nape of his neck.

As for how Kame himself felt about it...well, the evidence of that was pressed against Jin too, and their robes weren't thick enough for it to go unnoticed.

Slowly, Kame tried to ease himself backwards, hoping to turn over before Jin woke, but it wasn't to be.

"Don't move," Jin whispered. "You're warm."

"Are you cold?" Kame whispered back.

"A little bit. The fire's gone out."

"Maybe that's our host's way of telling us to get up and dress."

Jin laughed softly. "I think he's still asleep. I would be too, given the choice."

"Then go back to sleep for a bit; I need to go to the bathroom."

With this excuse, Kame finally managed to slip away. Either Jin hadn't noticed or was too polite to mention; Kame resolved the issue by himself in the bathroom, emerging to find Jin sprawled across the couch and Nakamaru cheating by using magic to boil the kettle.

"Tea?" Nakamaru made the offer with eyes half-open, clearly not a morning person.

"I think it'll be safer if I make it." Kame took over tea duty, sorting out cups for the three of them. He had to threaten to dump Jin's over him to make him sit up and take it.

"You told me to go back to sleep," Jin protested. "That's what I was doing. I'll never manage it now."

This didn't stop him drinking his way through a couple of cups, or giving the kitchen cupboards plaintive looks. Nakamaru did eventually take the hint, once his eyes opened enough to notice Jin's silent pleas for food, and sorted out some breakfast. Kame impressed everyone with his one-handed egg cracking; Nakamaru tried to go one better by having a bunch of flowers appear from his egg, but ended up with a sack of flour materialising in the frying pan instead.

"I should've been more specific," he said sadly, and started work on a fresh omelette.

Once everyone was in a fit state for travel, Nakamaru locked up the cabin, grabbed a bag and, as promised, walked them through the woods to the road. Stormy weather had given way to blue skies and sunshine, a perfect day for a walk, but here their host had another surprise for them.

"What are we waiting for?" Jin asked.

"He should be along in...3...2...1," Nakamaru counted down. "Ah, there he is. Taguchi!"

A tall, bright-eyed young man waved down at them from the front of a covered, horse-drawn wagon. "Iriguchi deguchi Taguchi desu!"

Nakamaru groaned. "If he does that at the trials I'm sure he'll be laughed at."

"Maybe not for the reasons he's hoping," Kame said. "Which trials?"

"For the Bardic Guild." The newcomer dismounted to introduce himself as Junnosuke Taguchi, aspiring bard and much vaunted acrobat.

"I said I'd cheer him on at the trials if he brought transport for both of us." Nakamaru explained the situation to Taguchi, who eyed Jin's guitar with interest.

"Even though you're competition, we can give you a lift," Taguchi said.

Jin swung his guitar case over his shoulder. "Bring it on."

"He means, 'we'd be happy to accept your kind offer'," Kame said hastily.

"No machismo this soon after breakfast," Nakamaru said, spreading his hands in a peacemaking gesture. "You'll get indigestion."

Setting aside the spirit of competition for the time being, Jin helped Taguchi unfasten the tarp from the wagon and push it back to leave the interior half-exposed, in order that they might enjoy the light as they travelled. Nakamaru rode up front with his friend, while Jin and Kame were relegated to the inside - not much of a hardship, as the outer seats had no padding.

Jin couldn't resist poking around in the luggage. "You play the guitar too, Taguchi?"

"Not really, but I thought I could _string_ the judges along!"

Kame took advantage of his seat behind Nakamaru to whisper into the other man's ear, "Is he always like this?"

Nakamaru nodded. "You get used to it."

"It's my primary instrument," Taguchi said after Jin was the only person to give him a smile rather than a groan. "Secondary's the saxophone. I like a little jazz."

Privately, Kame thought that admission alone might be enough to get Taguchi barred from the Bardic Guild for life, but it certainly made things interesting. Between the two aspiring bards in the wagon, the judges weren't going to know what had hit them.

When they stopped to water the horses and stretch their legs, Nakamaru cornered Kame behind a tree to broach the subject again of last night's experiment.

Kame rushed to close his coat. "Do you mind? I'm behind this tree for a reason, you know."

"Ah...sorry." Nakamaru blushed cherry-red and turned away. "You weren't surprised when the paper changed colour, were you?"

"I..." Kame sighed, not wanting to explain fully. Jin was _his_ mystery to figure out. "I didn't know it would turn purple, just that something might go weird. Sometimes when Jin makes music, strange things happen - but he's not using magic. I'd know if he was."

"Are you sure he's not using music as a focus, the way I do with my beatboxing?"

"Positive. He even managed it while we were inside an anti-magic field, where he had _no_ access to atmospheric magic whatsoever."

"Perhaps he's accessing it some other way?"

They bandied theories about for a couple of minutes until the pressure on Kame's bladder became unbearable and he had to shoo Nakamaru away. There was a definite down side to travelling with company, he thought.

The sun set before they arrived in Sendai, so the first order of business was to find somewhere to stay for the night.

"And Taguchi and I need to register for the trials," Jin said with the air of one who'd done this so many times it was old hat by now, though it would be only his second attempt. "We can do that at the Guildhall."

Twice a year, Sendai found itself packed with prospective bards, all eager to take the trials. Then there were their families and friends, coming to offer support. Noble houses often sent scouts to monitor the trials and recruit talented new members to their own employ. And of course, there were some people for whom the trials were nothing more than a free concert, held, as they were, in the open air. Accommodation was at a premium.

After being turned away by almost every hostelry in town, the group finally found lodgings at a quaint little place, done up in black and white, that went by the name of 'The Tipsy Panda'. Kame was enchanted by the sign, which featured a slightly inebriated panda rolling around with a beer bottle.

"It looks a bit like you," he said to Jin, who'd exchanged his plaid hooded cape for an oversized black and white jumper.

"I don't see the resemblance," Jin said, but the others begged to differ.

The only rooms left were doubles, so Kame resigned himself to sharing with Jin again. At least the bed looked bigger than Nakamaru's couch, though he'd have further to fall if Jin did steal all the space during the night.

Since Nakamaru had work to be getting on with, in the form of a dozen sheets of purple notepaper he'd slipped in his bag before leaving, the others were happy to leave him to it. Taguchi had to take care of the wagon and the stabling of the horses, so Kame and Jin went alone to find the Guildhall.

Kame triple-checked his clothes hid his pendant before stepping outside. While he'd seen a sign for the Mages' Guildhall on their quest for accommodation, he preferred not to identify himself as a mage till he knew how they were treated locally. He'd advised Nakamaru to do the same, but the other mage hadn't even bothered to bring his pin, saying he didn't much care if the Guild acknowledged him or not - he'd only joined because he got discounts in all his favourite restaurants. As all his favourite restaurants happened to be in a town where he was no longer welcome, he saw no reason to wear his membership on his collar.

"Do you remember how to find the Guildhall?" Kame asked.

"Not exactly," Jin said, "just that it's at the opposite end from the Philosophers' Guildhall. They like the silence so they can hear themselves talk, so they prefer to keep away from bards."

Fortunately, the trials being a great boon to the tourist industry, the details were plastered all over every available wall space, and it wasn't long till they found a poster pointing towards the Guildhall they wanted. Twenty minutes of strolling down bright, bustling streets brought them to their goal - a pale blue mansion with the Bardic Guild's vine-wrapped quaver emblazoned on the doors.

"They hold the actual trials in the garden," Jin explained. "But we'll have to go inside to register."

The man who let them in didn't look as though he had a musical bone in his body, though the ostentatious brooch pinned to his robe proclaimed otherwise. He looked down his nose at them - of necessity, as he must've been at least six and a half feet tall - with a cool, appraising stare and led them to an office. He didn't offer them seats.

"Name?" he barked.

"Jin Akanishi."

"Instruments?"

"Primary: guitar. Secondary: drums. I...uh...I'll need to borrow a drumkit for the trials."

The bard rolled his eyes. "Of course you will." He scribbled a note in the register. "Any loan of Guild equipment requires proof of identity; a birth certificate will do."

Looking at the bard was giving Kame a crick in the neck, so he was watching Jin instead - a much nicer view. At the mention of birth certificates, Jin's face fell and he dropped his gaze to the floor.

"I don't have a birth certificate," he mumbled. "Lost it in a house fire."

"If you can't request a copy from your place of birth by the end of the week, you will not be able to borrow Guild equipment," the bard said nastily. "If you don't have another instrument, you will be ineligible to participate in the trials.

"Of course if you had something to use as collateral..."

Kame didn't know if the bard was genuinely looking for collateral or if he was after a bribe, but the overall impact was the same - Jin's look of disappointment spoke volumes. And disappointment, Kame thought, was not a look Jin wore well, nor was it one he ever wanted to see on the aspiring bard's face again.

"Will this do for collateral?" Kame reached inside his coat for the tiny gem pouch sewn into one of the inner pockets and extracted a dark blue sapphire. Although Kimura had been reluctant to see his former apprentice go chasing dragons, he'd been even more reluctant to let him go without a source of finance. Dragons hoarded well: Takuya Kimura hoarded better.

The bard inspected the jewel carefully before deigning to accept. "This might just cover it. I'll write you a receipt; you can collect it from here afterwards once our equipment has been returned undamaged."

He sealed the sapphire in a clear bag, labelled it with contents, date and number, then gave Kame a piece of paper bearing the same information. Kame got Jin to sign it. The bag disappeared into a wall safe and Jin received a slip with his candidate number and timeslot.

"Tomorrow morning? I thought I'd be on the last day or something!"

"We had a cancellation," the bard informed him. "The fellow whose slot you're taking had both his arms broken last night when he couldn't pay his hotel bill - he'll probably never play the harpsichord again." He gave Kame a significant look. "I imagine your finances are in better shape."

Kame nodded non-committally, gave Taguchi's details and picked up a slip for him after confirming he didn't have to register in person. Taguchi also had a slot tomorrow morning. "What happened to free up this one?"

"Candidate ran off to join the circus."

Given Taguchi's penchant for acrobatics, Kame thought the replacement quite fitting.

Registration complete, they returned to the Tipsy Panda, where the other two were making serious inroads into a giant sharing platter. Upon hearing that he had a morning slot, Taguchi bolted the rest of his food, grabbed his instrument cases and disappeared for some last minute practice.

"Shouldn't you be doing the same?" Nakamaru asked Jin.

"Got other priorities right now." Jin flagged down a server. "I can't make music on an empty stomach."

\-----

Jin never did manage any formal practice that evening but when one of the other guests started an impromptu singsong in the dining room, he threw himself into it with great gusto. Even Kame joined in with the ones he knew, earning himself a look of pleased surprise from Jin. Kame wasn't the strongest singer in the world, but he had a sweet voice and Jin proved adept at harmonising with him, wrapping his own voice around Kame's weaker notes and reinforcing them till they blended into one soaring, glorious melody. Nakamaru provided voice percussion - without the magic, this time - until he declared himself done for the night and retired to bed.

Shortly after, Kame and Jin did the same.

"Here we go again," Jin said once they were both settled in the bed. "I'll try not to take up more than my half."

Kame grinned and snuffed the light with a twitch of his fingers. At least he could still do some useful things even without his ruby. "If you do I won't come along to cheer for you tomorrow."

"Oh, you will. You didn't travel with me all this way to abandon me in my moment of need, did you?" In the dark, Jin's cockiness dissipated. "And speaking of need...um...I meant to say thank you for earlier. At the Guildhall. You didn't have to do that."

"I know, but I wanted to. It's okay." Kame wanted to say something about how Jin had better give him a good show tomorrow in payment, but the playful mood they'd brought with them from downstairs had fled with the light, leaving quiet, contemplative darkness behind. Joking now, he felt, would be inappropriate.

There was one thing he wanted to ask before they went to sleep, however. "Jin, your birth certificate - was that house fire your 'something worse'?"

"Worse than that."

"I'm sorry," Kame said automatically.

"It isn't..." Jin shifted, making the mattress creak. Kame could tell from the location of his voice that he'd turned on his side. "There was no fire. I don't know what happened to my birth certificate."

An admission of loss, possibly, but Kame didn't think he'd made up the fire story to cover for accidental misplacement. "You can request a new one from your town of birth. They'll probably charge you, but they'll have a copy."

"Great, except that I don't know where that is. I don't know where I was born, Kame."

"Oh. Do you... Have you..." Kame wasn't even sure what he was trying to ask.

Jin didn't wait for him to figure it out. "You told me something awful because I said I'd tell you something worse, so I guess I owe you this. I...um...I have amnesia, okay? I woke up about fifteen months ago in a hospital in Aomori; a group of fishermen had found me unconscious at Mutsu Bay wearing nothing but a gold necklace and brought me in for treatment. It took a while for them to tell me this because I couldn't understand them at first, much less talk back. When I'd listened enough it finally started to make sense, and the doctors could ask me questions.

"I didn't have any answers for them. I didn't remember how I got there, or what had happened to my clothes - or even who I was."

As bad as his own tale had been, Kame didn't think it even came close to Jin's.

"I didn't have any injuries except a few scratches, so they decided I must've undergone some serious trauma and blocked everything out," Jin continued. "I spent a couple of months there, playing their games and listening to their encouraging words about how if I just worked on it, my memory would come back. Like I'd somehow locked everything away in my head, and if I found the right key, I'd get to unlock it all again. None of it worked.

"But one of the techniques they tried on me was to sing songs that were popular over the last twenty-five years or so. I didn't remember any of them - but I picked them up and sang them back, better than any of those amateurs could do it. Then they decided I must've been a musician, and I kind of liked the idea.

"I was working mostly with this one doctor - Yamapi, he told me to call him, because he liked to keep it informal, friendly - and he taught me how to play guitar. He was the one who gave me my name, too.

"I could've stayed forever, I think. The doctors wouldn't give up on me regaining my memory. I was the one who gave up. I didn't know anything about myself before I woke up in hospital, and I still don't, but I knew a little bit about who I'd been since then and I wanted to find out more. Yamapi helped me sell my necklace to buy my own guitar and introduced me to his friend Ryo, a guy who played music on the streets after he'd finished work for the day. Ryo showed me the ropes, taught me some more songs; between the two of them, they helped me deal with leaving the hospital for the outside world. Some of the people who heard me play said I was good enough to be a Guild bard, so that's when I left and came here to try out."

"Those people were right," Kame said, picking out this one point because he had no idea how to address the rest of it and he considered that complimenting Jin on his strengths was probably a better idea than consoling him over his misfortune. "You're easily good enough to join the Bardic Guild."

"I wasn't six months ago," Jin sighed. "But that was my own fault for not preparing properly; as I couldn't play any other instruments I didn't even get to try out. Since then I spent my time travelling around, learning more songs and writing new ones, and I ended up staying in Osaka for a while. Ryo was visiting a friend of his there, and the friend taught me how to play the drums. I was coming north again for the trials when I got thrown in your cell.

"So that's why I don't have a birth certificate." Jin laughed bitterly, choking it down with a pained gasp that made Kame wonder if he was starting to cry. "Even if I had one, how would I know it was mine?"

"You're right; that _was_ something worse." A sad story with a false beginning and no real ending, with a middle based on pretence. Jin didn't even know his real name.

Tentatively, Kame reached for Jin's hand under the blankets; he found one curled into a tight fist, nails digging into the palm, soft skin stretched taut over bone. He closed his hand over the fist, squeezing gently to let Jin know he wasn't alone, that he had someone there to listen if he wanted to say by night all the things too painful to contemplate by day. It wasn't a seductive gesture and Kame didn't intend for it to be one.

"If I ever need a tragic song, I can always write about myself." Though Jin's voice caught, Kame could feel his fingers starting to unclench.

"I think that for a guy in your situation, you're doing very well; you're not sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself - you're doing the best you can to create a new life. Maybe one day you'll remember who you were, but if you just wait for it to happen, you'll waste this life too."

"Yeah, but..." Jin tensed again. "A lot of things came back to me while I was at the hospital. I couldn't read at first, or write, or do sums, but stuff like that returned over time when the doctors showed me. But nothing personal. I might have a wife somewhere, Kame. I might have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend - I might even have a kid! I might have a family and friends waiting for me to come home and they'll never know what's happened to me. Maybe they all think I'm dead."

"That's a lot of possibilities you can't do anything about." Kame began to stroke his thumb lightly across Jin's wrist, trying to soothe him with small, regular touches. "Not unless- no, forget it."

"Unless?"

"I shouldn't have mentioned it." But Kame knew why he had, why he'd let that tantalising snippet slip out.

"Tell me. Please."

"There are more kinds of forbidden magic than the ones I told you about before." Kame tried to ensure he didn't sound too eager to explain. What he was about to tell Jin was both foolhardy and dangerous, and worst of all it was true. But it would keep Jin by his side a little longer, the very fate he'd hoped to avoid a few short days ago. "There's a spell you can use to look into the past. Mostly it's used on antiques to learn their origins, and it's legal for use on inanimate objects.

"But using it on people is against the law. Magic..." Kame sighed heavily. Explaining magic to non-mages: always an enjoyable experience. "If I channel magic from the atmosphere into an object to look into its past, the spell has to reset the structure of that object to its former state, as determined by the length of time required. When the object's in that state, a vision of its past can be generated.

"Try that on a human and you turn back their body clock. If you're not good enough to reverse the process, they'll be stuck that way. Transformative magic."

"Illegal, I remember." Jin tugged his hand free, calmer now. "Are you good enough?"

"Not without a focus."

"But if you had your ruby back?"

"Then...yes, I think so."

"Then it's settled: I'm coming with you after I pass the trials."

Part of Kame wanted to protest that Jin should stay well away from the dragon and all the accompanying dangers. The rest of him, which was far more cynical, pointed out that if he felt that strongly about keeping Jin out of danger he wouldn't have said anything in the first place, and he'd offered Jin hope for his own selfish reasons. Kame told both parts to shut up and mind their own business and hoped he hadn't said anything aloud to convince Jin he was sharing a bed with a raving lunatic.

"You can't talk me out of it," Jin said firmly. "You're the only person who hasn't told me some junk about searching inside my heart for the answers. If you've got a practical solution then let's go for it: I'd rather do something than spend all my time thinking about things I _could_ do that won't get me anywhere.

"Besides, this way I'll be around to see the end of your story and I can write it properly."

"You'll be part of it yourself," Kame said, resolving not to think about it till after the trials. One life-changing event at a time. "Every good hero needs a sidekick."

"Sidekick!"

Kame drifted off to sleep with Jin's indignant protests still ringing in his ears.


	5. Chapter 5

When Jin bundled him out the door without breakfast, Kame thought the building was on fire and they were all being evacuated. Fortunately, the reason for the rush was to ensure both Kame and Nakamaru got decent seats at the trials, and there were enough foodstalls set up around the Guildhall that Kame didn't have to worry about any of them starving before the event. In his excitement, Jin treated them all to sweet rolls for breakfast before dashing off with Taguchi to check in with the Guild.

"I didn't expect that," Nakamaru said. "I thought you were the financial half of the team."

Kame smiled and swallowed a bite of his roll. Jin had good taste(sometimes). "He has his moments."

They got their second surprise of the morning when they arrived at the garden of the Bardic Guildhall. The Guild had cordoned off a large section for the audience, with a low barrier keeping them away from the stage set up at the far end. Adjacent to the stage on the left, they'd set up a table for the judges - three, based on the number of empty chairs - while on the right, more comfortable looking chairs for VIP guests were already occupied by the mayor and her entourage.

The bard on the door directed Kame and Nakamaru to the second row of seats, close enough to get a good view of the proceedings though should a stampede chance to happen, they'd both be flattened in seconds. Kame resolved to focus only on the trials for the time being. He had to keep a close eye on things, he'd decided, in case one of Jin's songs worked its strange, non-magical magic. It would be a great shame if he were to bring the house down for all the wrong reasons.

Kame's surprise - and Nakamaru's too, as it turned out - took the form of Koki Tanaka, who sat in the seat on Kame's left, reading a book on dressmaking. He'd traded in the set of black robes for a studded leather jacket, which Kame thought suited him much better, and augmented his accessory collection with several earrings.

"Koki!" Kame and Nakamaru exclaimed in unison, then turned to each other.

"Morning!" Koki greeted them. "Didn't know you guys knew each other."

"Likewise," Kame said.

"Penpal." Nakamaru answered Kame's unasked question. "Koki writes the sweetest letters, full of tender sentiments and updates about his dogs."

Koki beamed. "I mean every word, too. The dogs are staying with my neighbour."

"It helps to have contact with another mage occasionally," Nakamaru said. "So how do the two of you know each other?"

Kame quickly explained the somewhat painful circumstances of their meeting - Koki crashing into him - and hoped Koki wouldn't ask him how the dragonslaying business was going.

Fortunately, Koki left the subject alone. "All of us working on the ward repairs take it in turns to have a week off every now and then to rest and recharge ourselves, so I thought I'd come see the trials you mentioned," he explained to Kame. "I don't think I'd ever try out, but it's kinda nice to see what's out there, you know?"

"You could try out," Nakamaru said. "You play guitar and piano."

"I'm not sure the world's ready for a bard who raps."

"Maybe; maybe not," Kame said. "I think they're about to get one who has the drums as his secondary instrument - and one who plays jazz."

"And tapdances," Nakamaru added. "Today's trials should be entertaining."

The local Guildmaster opened the event promptly at nine, by which time all the audience seats were filled and so many people had crowded in the back that even the fire exits were blocked. The mayor made a quick speech, mostly praising the Bardic Guild for supporting the tourist industry, and the judges filed out from the Guildhall to take their seats.

Two of the judges were more or less as Kame had expected: one stern, greybearded gentleman in his sixties whose pale blue robes were marginally less starched than the man himself, and an equally severe woman who couldn't have been more than a decade younger. Quite possibly not Jin's target audience, then.

Of the third judge, little could be seen. He (Kame only reached this conclusion due to the flatness of the figure's chest) was short, on the slender side, and had his hood pulled low over his eyes. Since he also wore a large, chunky scarf, the lower part of his face remained a mystery too. He sat between the other two, and was the only one to prop his elbows on the table.

"Maybe he's here to execute the people who sing out of tune?" Kame suggested, keeping his voice low.

"I think he's just a judge," Nakamaru murmured back. "Without the 'jury and executioner' part."

Once all the officials were in position, the screens covering the stage were pulled aside to reveal all the instruments bulky enough that they were being borrowed from the Guild by the day's candidates. The drums sat in the middle, with a piano on the left - and, to everyone's surprise, a set of steel drums on the right. It was shaping up to be an interesting day.

The first two candidates were traditional Bardic Guild material. One male, one female, they sang songs of courtly love from days gone by, of knights in shining armour battling savage beasts to save fair maidens and win their hands in marriage. The woman played an instrumental on a flute; the man, on a clarinet, and their primary instruments were harp and lute respectively.

The woman made it through to the next round, but the man got a thumbs-down from the hooded judge and ran off the stage.

After struggling to stay awake for the first two candidates, Kame had no such trouble with the third. Jin's outfit alone set him apart from the others - while they'd worn robes in the style of the Guild members, he wore blue jeans, a white V-neck shirt and a stylish black vest shot through with silver, all of which only served to emphasise his fine figure. Kame wished he wouldn't hide it under baggy clothing so much, because the view really was quite enjoyable.

"That's Kame's partner," Nakamaru whispered to Koki as an explanation for why Kame was suddenly gaping at the stage. Kame didn't correct him.

For the first round, candidates played a piece on each instrument, one of which could be instrumental if it was impossible to sing while playing - a problem Jin didn't have - and one had to be a traditional song to prove the candidates had knowledge of history and culture.

Jin's first choice of song wasn't traditional so much as a classic, a beautiful rendition of 'Kimi wo Omou Toki', softly strummed on guitar. Kame sang along under his breath and looked around to find most of the audience doing the same. Not so the judges, two of whom wore frowns. Whether the hooded judge shared their expression, no one could tell, but it seemed unlikely since he was the only one actually swaying in time to the music.

"Now _that's_ more like it," Koki muttered.

Applause wasn't allowed at the trials, as Kame discovered when he tried to get a round going, but he felt less embarrassed about it when Jin shot him a grateful smile from the stage.

If Jin's first song had been a well-known and much-loved classic, his second was a complete mystery to everyone save himself. He set his guitar aside, took a seat behind the drums, and sang in such a distorted falsetto that not even Kame, who was really trying, could make out more than one word in three. Something to do with snow, possibly.

No swaying from the hooded judge this time, but the female judge, who'd spent most of the performance watching Jin's arms with a predatory smile, gave him a nod of approval and like that, Jin was through to the second round.

They took a five-minute break to remove the drums from the stage - evidently, Jin was the only candidate to request them - and started up again with Junnosuke Taguchi.

For someone so perpetually happy, Taguchi's first choice of song was unexpected - a solo guitar version of that popular power ballad, 'Distance'. Also not particularly traditional, but mournful enough to get a faint nod from the male judge.

His second, a jazzy little number on the saxophone, finished with a short tap dance. Had he been able to dance while playing the sax, Kame was pretty sure he'd have done so. Taguchi's feet didn't stop moving during the song, tap shoes beating out a rhythm on the stage that Kame couldn't help but mirror with his own boots.

"Lively, isn't he?" Nakamaru murmured. "And he's easily the best-dressed candidate. I lent him that bow tie."

Taguchi wore a smart, shiny suit of the same pale blue as the Bardic robes - as a subtle tribute or simply a sign that the man was a dandy, Kame didn't know. He couldn't disagree with Nakamaru's statement, however.

They watched another six candidates before lunch, one of whom proved to have no little skill on the steel drums but still didn't make it through to the next round. Kame struggled to stay awake; Koki didn't even bother trying, coming to with a start when the male judge announced there would be an hour's lunch break.

It was like he'd set a cat loose in a henhouse. At the mere mention of lunch, the audience scattered, rushing as fast as they could go to the various food stalls set up around the Guildhall. Being near the front, Kame's party couldn't move very far until the rest of the crowd had dissipated and by that time, the others had found them.

"Did you like my performance?" Jin asked excitedly. "I wrote the second song myself."

He looked like a little kid checking to see if he'd done something good, all bright eyes and shy smiles. Kame resisted the urge to pat him on the head and tell him he'd been a good boy.

"The second one was interesting," Koki said, "but I didn't get what you were singing about."

"Sorry, but I couldn't really follow it either." Kame hated to admit it. "I thought it was very creative, though."

Jin refused to even consider Koki's opinion until they'd been introduced. As the only one who knew them all Nakamaru handled the introductions, inadvertently revealing that he'd met Taguchi on a group date.

"With girls," he added, just in case anyone got the wrong idea.

Koki snickered. "Was this at another one of your fancy gourmet restaurants?"

Nakamaru nodded. "But the girls didn't like it and they left early."

"So the rest of us went to play billiards," Taguchi said. "And I think that's my _cue_ to leave for lunch."

The five of them split up to find the food stalls with the shortest queues and met back in the garden with an odd assortment of comestibles, most of which had no nutritional value whatsoever but tasted delicious. While they ate, they discussed the other candidates.

"The babyfaced guy with the fluffy hair - I thought he had a lovely voice," Kame said. "I don't know why he didn't make it through to the next round."

"I do," Jin said darkly. "The little creep was trying to cozy up to one of the judges before the event. Serves him right."

Kame collected his sapphire from the Guildhall after he'd finished eating. Once all the players were back in place, the trials continued. The final two candidates for the first round both made it through, increasing the number of second round candidates to eight.

The second round started immediately afterwards. This time, candidates performed one song only - an original composition. One of the most important attributes a bard should have, said the Guildmaster, was creativity. A bard who couldn't write their own material was no better than a common minstrel - mildly entertaining under certain circumstances, but by no means worthy.

Jin was second in line, this time, and Kame felt sure his performance would earn him his coveted spot in the Guild.

"This is a song I wrote to thank some friends whose love kept me going during dark times." Jin sat down on the stool, guitar in his lap. "I call it 'Care'."

Kame thought it was one of the most beautiful songs he'd heard in his life. Not just the lyrics, but the way they played out across Jin's face, gratitude shining in his eyes; strength, too, to offset the uncertainty, the fear of waking up alone without his identity. After hearing Jin's story, Kame knew who the song was for...and part of him hoped that one day, he'd be able to count himself of that number.

If he managed not to get them both roasted by the dragon, of course.

"I think he's the favourite," Nakamaru muttered as Jin bowed deeply and left the stage, the first candidate to make it through to the final round. "Did you see the way the female judge kept wiping away tears? They all liked that one."

Koki smirked. "Knew I put my money on the right candidate."

"There are people taking bets on the trials?" Kame asked, wishing he'd known earlier so he could've wagered on Jin.

"There's an informal betting shop behind the yakiniku stall," Koki said. "I found it while we were on lunch."

Nakamaru shushed them because Taguchi took to the stage in a peculiar, horned outfit, resembling a creature of myth rather than an acrobatic jazz musician. Kame spotted the hooded judge doubling over with laughter and wasn't sure whether this was a good sign or not.

"At least it's a creative performance?" Kame whispered to Nakamaru. "They can't possibly deny his originality."

"I suppose not," Nakamaru said faintly.

No tears from any of the judges, but the hooded judge picked up a large, folded fan, climbed up on the stage and hit Taguchi lightly over the head with it before giving him a thumbs up. The male judge groaned and clutched his forehead; the female judge offered him a painkiller from her handbag.

Another three candidates made it through to the final round, taking the total to five, and everyone broke for a twenty-minute teabreak. Kame found himself abandoned as the others joined the mad dash for the bathroom, but Jin popped out of the Guildhall to steal Nakamaru's seat for a bit.

"One more round to go!"

"I'm sure you'll make it in," Kame said. "What do you have to do this time?"

Jin grinned furtively. "Oh, I think you'll like it. For the final round we have to perform one song acapella. I'm going to do the song that got me arrested."

"Are you sure that's a good idea? If you land up in jail again I'm not bailing you out, just so you know."

"If Taguchi's 'Samurai Love Attack' didn't put him behind bars, I'm pretty sure I'll be safe. But thanks for worrying."

"Just don't..." What Kame wanted to say was, "Don't screw it up", but that wasn't quite what he meant. "Don't let anything stand in your way," was what emerged.

"I won't." Steely determination hardened Jin's voice. "There's no set number of candidates they can take in one day - they don't have to accept any if no one passes, or they could take everyone.

"And today, even if they don't take anyone else, they're going to take _me_."

 _And if they don't, I will,_ Kame thought, but he kept that one to himself.

"Good luck," he said. "I know you'll be amazing."

"If I don't make it in this time, maybe I should try out for the Mages' Guild instead?" Jin suggested with a laugh. "You tell me I'm not using magic but that I'm doing it anyway - that alone should make me interesting enough for them to let me in."

"Don't!" Jin looked shocked at his vehemence, so Kame attempted to explain himself. "I mean, if you go to the Mages' Guild, they'll want to study you - take you apart to find out what you're doing. You're lucky Nakamaru and I are the only mages who know about it, and that he's more interested in saving the planet than slicing you up."

"And what are _you_ interested in?"

The question might have been playful but Jin's eyes were anything but, searching Kame's face carefully for any truths he didn't feel inclined to speak aloud. Under the intensity of Jin's gaze, Kame couldn't bring himself to say something flippant, not wanting the other man to get the wrong idea. (Exactly what the right idea was, he couldn't have said.)

Fortunately Koki reappeared at that moment, saving Kame from having to untangle every emotion Jin had evoked in him since they'd met and arrange them in some sort of order. They frowned on babbling in the Mages' Guild - it led to all kinds of unpredictable spells - and Kame didn't think he could string together a coherent sentence to answer Jin's question.

Koki handed him a beer, took one look at their faces and told them both to get a room.

The final round began with very little fanfare as the first candidate could barely be heard. She slunk off the stage after the second verse, rubbing her throat with one hand and her eyes with the other.

"But she was the loudest person out there earlier," Nakamaru said as they waited for the second candidate to appear. "I think there must be something wrong."

"Maybe that cheeky-looking guitarist sabotaged her?" Kame suggested. "Taguchi said he'd met the guy before and he's a practical joker."

When the aforementioned guitarist emerged to perform his own final number, singing about a secret, Kame felt pretty sure his guess was on the money. The guy's face had "cunning" written all over it. Saboteur or not, he impressed the judges enough to become the first candidate accepted into the Bardic Guild that day, and was promptly whisked off to be buried in paperwork.

The third candidate, another woman, secured her own spot in the Guild with an impressive aria - not to everyone's tastes, if the audience's reactions were any indication, but the two unhooded judges loved it. Kame tried to pay attention out of sheer politeness, but the third candidate down meant only two left to go, Taguchi...and Jin. Kame couldn't help feeling a trifle nervous.

Taguchi had traded in the horns for the blue suit again, looking far too suave and sophisticated for someone whose previous performance wouldn't have been out of place at a children's party. He announced his song as 'Love Music' and snapped his fingers through a smooth, upbeat tune that had Kame bopping along in time. Taguchi had a lovely voice, he had to admit, even if not as interesting to him as Jin's, and the judges evidently liked it too because their conference lasted less than a minute.

"He's in!" Nakamaru cheered under his breath, then added, "I hope that doesn't mean he'll charge me for performing when he comes to visit."

Koki stopped laughing at Nakamaru's concern when he spotted Kame holding his chair arms like grim death. "Nervous?"

"I just want him to get in," Kame said. "I think I understand, now, why he wants to have the Guild's acceptance, and I don't want to see what happens if they reject him."

Nakamaru patted him on the shoulder. "I doubt it'll come to that."

"Besides," Koki said, "between the three of us I'm sure we've got enough magical firepower to take out the Guildhall unless they agree to let him in."

Nakamaru's expression of horror served to relax Kame, at least enough that he could loose the stranglehold on his chair. Whatever happened, he couldn't affect it, couldn't do anything to help. Jin had to make it on his own.

The odds of that looked less likely when Jin arrived on the stage and attempted to introduce his song. "Um...this song's called 'Lovejuice' and it's...uh...not about what you probably think it's about. It's not about _that_ , okay?" He accompanied this explanation with a hand gesture that made the female judge raise an approving eyebrow; Kame sighed and wondered if it would help sway her decision.

"Sure it isn't," Koki muttered, and clamped a hand over his mouth to keep his laughter down to a minimum.

Laughter bubbled up in Kame's throat too, as Jin's lyrics made him think of teenage frustrations and wet dreams - not that he'd had the confidence outside of dreams, as a teenager, to pick up hot women in clubs. But it wasn't the lyrics keeping Kame's eyes riveted to the stage; nor was it Jin's light, breathy voice, beautiful without any accompaniment.

It was the dancing, which gave Kame great appreciation for just how much control Jin had over his body. Kame didn't know dance, didn't know the movements, but Jin wielded his four limbs with the precision of a master swordsman, no action wasted and every move executed to perfection.

Hip rolls included. Kame flashed back to pressing up against Jin on Nakamaru's couch the previous morning and wondered what it would've felt like if they'd moved together, if their host hadn't been there to overhear soft moans and the rustle of bedding. He could see how Jin had managed to get himself arrested for solicitation - any innocent passerby would be hard-pressed (emphasis on the first word) to ignore such temptation. Indeed, the audience members were practically salivating, including those old enough to be Jin's great-grandparents.

"I think the judges want to do him right there on the stage," Koki whispered. "Witnesses and all. At least the two whose faces I can see."

"This is the wrong guild for that," Nakamaru said quietly. "And I believe pole-dancing is a mandatory qualification for that one."

Kame thought it best not to mention his pole-dancing experience. (Staying with Kimura had been extremely educational, though not always in ways of which his parents would've approved.) "Did he just sing what I thought he sang?"

"Probably," Nakamaru said. "I'm sure no one's ever mentioned that word in a Bardic trial before."

Scandalous lyrics aside, Jin's performance finished without incident. The judges didn't even bother to consult each other and Jin left the stage wearing a giddy grin, escorted by two bards who both tried to get a guiding arm around him - for his own safety, of course. Kame beamed for all he was worth.

The Guildmaster reappeared long enough to read out the names of the new recruits and close the event, inviting everyone to join them again tomorrow morning for the second day of trials. Kame had no interest in any of the other candidates - he'd seen all he wanted to see of the Bardic Guild for the time being.

Being near the front, they had to wait for the rest of the audience to file out before making a move. Taguchi turned up first. He had inkstains all over his hands from signing paperwork and his bowtie was crooked, but the look of ecstasy on his face said he didn't care one jot. Nakamaru took advantage of his blissful ignorance to steal the bowtie back.

They were so busy offering congratulations that none of them noticed the hooded judge sneaking up from behind.

"You should've told me you were coming," a familiar voice addressed Nakamaru. "I could've gotten you front row seats."

"Ah!" Kame clapped a hand to his mouth as the judge pushed back his hood. "It's you!"

"Not 'it's you'," Ueda admonished him. "Ueda. Did you enjoy the first day of the trials?"

"I didn't know you were going to be one of the judges today," Nakamaru said. "What's with the hood?"

Ueda grinned. "The first day candidates are usually boring; I thought if I covered my eyes, no one would notice they were shut."

"Take your position seriously!"

"You worry too much," Ueda said. "How's that recycling project of yours coming along?"

"If you ever need to write love letters to your groupies, I can offer you a year's worth of purple notepaper."

"My fanclub president takes care of that."

"Is this guy another one of your penpals?" Koki asked, looking from Namakaru to Ueda with interest. "How many bards do you know, anyway?"

Once again, Nakamaru had to make the introductions, with Kame adding his explanation of how he and Jin had run into Ueda before.

"There's something wrong with this picture," Ueda said to Nakamaru. "How did _you_ get to be the social hub of the universe?"

"I'm a naturally friendly guy! I have lots of good qualities."

"He's a good host," Kame said.

"Always has biscuits," Taguchi added.

"Very conscientious," Koki said.

Ueda couldn't argue with that, being the travelling bard friend Nakamaru had mentioned previously.

"Jin told me you weren't really busking," Kame said. "We didn't realise you were already a Guild member, though."

"I like to travel incognito," Ueda explained. "It's easier to pick up good stories for songs if no one knows I'm a professional."

"And that way the Guild doesn't find out he's keeping a harem on the side," Nakamaru said smugly. "They frown on that sort of thing."

The subject of Ueda's harem, which he kept insisting he didn't have, kept them going until Jin reappeared, still with the giddy smile and just as inkstained as Taguchi. He high-fived them all until he reached Ueda, at which point he did a double take.

"I liked the dancing," Ueda said. "But you should be careful if you're going to perform that one in public. You might get arrested."

Kame smirked. "Been there, done that."

"I've given shelter to an ex-con?"

Laughter at Nakamaru's mock outrage covered Kame's hushed "Congratulations", meant for Jin's ears only, but Jin acknowledged the word with a silent smile.

\-----

Kame had mixed memories of the victory celebrations. Ueda and Koki had both joined them at the Tipsy Panda for a meal, during which Koki taught all the bards present a thing or two about rapping and Ueda explained to the two new recruits how to go about advertising their availability for hire without anyone getting the wrong idea.

After the third Sendai resident had stopped by their table to buy Jin a drink, Jin had started handing them round to the rest of the group, though most of them seemed to end up with Kame. He'd lost count in short order.

Waking up next to Jin would've been a nice experience under any other circumstances, but not when Kame had both a headache and a decided lack of clothes under the blankets. Jin, in a similar state, faced the window, and Kame couldn't decide if it made it more or less awkward that they had their backs to each other. He didn't feel like he'd done anything last night, and it hadn't been such a long time that he'd forgotten the sensation completely...though with the amount of alcohol they'd consumed, he doubted they'd have been able to rise to the occasion in any case.

"Uh...Jin?"

He received a sleepy grunt in reply. Fine. Maybe he could discreetly wash and dress before Jin regained full consciousness, and hope the other man's memory was equally mangled.

No such luck. The floorboard creaked as Kame took a cautious step out of bed, and Jin rolled over.

"It can't be morning already," he grumbled. "We've only just gone to bed."

"I wish I could remember if that's true or not," Kame said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. However long they'd been in bed, it didn't feel like enough.

"Please tell me you don't want to go dragon-hunting this very minute, because if you do I'm going to kick you the rest of the way out of bed."

"You don't get to kick me out of bed." Just to be on the safe side, Kame slid the rest of the way off the mattress and dropped down in a crouch beside the bed, rummaging around for fresh clothes in his bag. He groaned when he found his outfit from yesterday.

"What happened last night? Did someone dump an entire barrel of ale over me?"

"Only half of one. The other half was over me." Jin flung a hand over his shoulder, towards his own heap of stained clothing. "Do you not remember the guy who kicked up a fuss when I said I wouldn't give him a private performance for his birthday?"

"No, but it doesn't surprise me. You attracted a lot of attention yesterday. Why did he soak me too?"

Jin smiled lazily. "You told him I wasn't available for hire right now because I was going with you...and then you said I was never going to be available for _him_ , and definitely not for _that_ , and he paid good money for an entire barrel just so he could empty it all over us."

"Good for me, I guess." Kame mentally congratulated himself for rising to Jin's defense. A good deed was a good deed, even he didn't remember it. "Er...did I say why you were going with me? Did I mention dragons?"

"Don't worry; you didn't say a word about your plans. You just grabbed my hand and held it till he got the idea. I think you were trying to be subtle."

"Oh." Kame knew he had a tendency to grab hands when drunk, especially if he was speaking passionately about something, but it was what he did afterwards that worried him most. "And...after that?" He prepared himself to hear the worst.

"Well, since we got completely drenched, we called it a night. Staggered in here, cleaned up best we could and collapsed. My hair still smells like a brewery, though."

Kame cautiously sniffed the air. "I don't think I'm any better off. We're not going anywhere yet."

"Good, then I'm going back to sleep." Jin burrowed into his pillow, lifting his head long enough to add, "Wake me when it's an hour that normal people might be up."

In exasperation, Kame reached up and batted him lightly across the back of the head. "Normal people _are_ up; I can hear them outside. And what are you trying to imply?"

Jin's response disappeared into the pillow, so Kame gave up for the time being and went to wash his hair until it gleamed.

An hour later, Kame had already dressed and popped next door to see Nakamaru and Taguchi. (Koki and Ueda, he knew, would both be at the second day of the trials, assuming either of them had been capable of leaving the table last night.) He found Nakamaru alone, preparing to leave.

"Taguchi's dropping me off on his way back to Tokyo; he'll base himself at the Guildhall there," Nakamaru said. "He's tending to the horses at the moment. Do you two need a ride?"

"We're going further north, but thanks for the offer - and thank you for putting us up the other night."

"Not a problem. It was nice to have some company." Nakamaru straightened his jacket. "Kame?"

"Hmm?"

"How much do you remember about last night?"

"Not that much," Kame confessed. "I know some guy took a shine to Jin and drenched us both with ale."

"But do you recall what happened to your attacker afterwards?"

"I'm hoping he got a clue."

"He got more than he bargained for. Jin was singing along with the minstrel in the taproom at the time - a song called 'Fall Down'. Guess what happened to the guy with the barrel?"

"He fell down," Kame said flatly. "Could be a coincidence. Drunk guys carrying heavy barrels must fall down all the time."

"He fell down whenever he stood up, which he must've done about a dozen times. I checked - magic was moving in the atmosphere; I couldn't tell where it was going but I do know it wasn't to him. You need to be careful. I don't think Jin even realised what he was doing."

Kame sank down on the bed, legs temporarily going on strike. What was he going to do about Jin? What if Jin sang as they travelled and the ground suddenly opened up and swallowed them both? Was he going to have to ask Jin not to sing, hum or whistle? Was it even possible?

"I'm not..." Nakamaru tried again. "I'm not going to report him to the Mages' Guild. I won't tell anyone. But the two of you need to figure out why this is happening so you can control it. It was funny this time, but I can see it causing trouble along the way."

"You and me both."

Kame returned to his room to find Jin towelling off dripping hair, leaving a trail of splashes all over the floor. This wouldn't have been so bad if he'd bothered to dress, or even wrap another towel around himself.

"Don't stand there with the door open!" Jin said. "People walk through the corridor all the time."

"After your performance yesterday I expected to find them lining up outside to take a peek." Kame obliged him by closing the door and returned to sorting through his stained clothing from last night, now fit only for burning. No amount of cleaning, he felt sure, would remove all traces of ale. Busying himself in this way meant he didn't have to pretend he wasn't looking at Jin.

Jin didn't seem to notice. "Have the others gone?"

"Soon. They said they'd stop by to say goodbye, so you might want to get dressed, unless you want them getting an eyeful."

"You already have." Jin shrugged. "We were so out of it last night I didn't even bother trying to put us in clean clothes."

No time like the present. "Jin, did we...did anything else happen last night?"

"You tripped over your own feet a couple of times when-"

"That's not what I meant and you know it."

Jin finished with the towel and stepped into a pair of clean pants. "Yeah, I do know, and we didn't. Did you want to? You didn't say anything."

Kame choked on his response. "And if I had said something?"

"Look, Kame, I'm...I'm not very good at picking up cues like that, okay?" Colour flooded Jin's cheeks. "Whatever experience I might've had before I woke up in Aomori, I've forgotten; I had to start all over again. It wouldn't even have occurred to me if Ryo hadn't taken me to this bar where some girls from the Whores' Guild worked, and-"

Kame held up a hand to stop him. "I get the picture. Sorry, it's just I don't usually wake up in situations like this, and since I couldn't remember much about last night..."

"You got the wrong idea," Jin finished for him. "That's okay. I guess it did look pretty suspicious. Next time I'll try to get you dressed."

"There won't be a next time," Kame vowed. "Last night was a celebration, so that was special. If we drink that much every night we'll never get anywhere near the dragon."

What he didn't mention was that being in less than full control of his faculties around Jin was obviously not a good idea, and especially not if Jin persisted in randomly breaking out into song. Kame might have to intervene with magic to prevent an earthquake or something.

"Yes, boss."

A knock on the door heralded the arrival of Nakamaru and Taguchi, the latter sporting a jaunty straw hat that gave Kame pause for thought. Jin finished dressing during the thanks and goodbyes, not saying much, and at Taguchi's insistence went downstairs to bid farewell to the horses.

"Research is my speciality," Nakamaru said to Kame before they joined the others. "If I find anything that might help explain Jin, I'll do a sending. Do you have a mirror with you?"

"A small travel one." He needed it to keep his eyebrows nicely shaped. "Here."

Nakamaru inspected the black compact inside and out before handing it back. "It'll do. I should be able to target this if I have to send you a message."

"And if I need to return the call?"

"Do you remember the little oval mirror standing on my desk?"

"Just about. I have to warn you, though - I'm not very good at precision work. If I make your mirror explode, I'll buy you another one."

"If the mirror explodes while I'm looking at it, I'm not sure I'll _need_ another one."

Once the horses had received sufficient petting Kame and Jin watched the wagon roll off into the distance, laughing at Nakamaru's pained expression every time it travelled over a bump in the road.

"Onwards," Kame said solemnly, and steered Jin back indoors because they were about to miss breakfast.

\-----

A quick chat with Ueda the night before had confirmed the dragon's passage over Sendai on its way home; Kame still hadn't got around to acquiring a map but he could find his way north, and it would be familiar territory for Jin. It didn't take them long to resupply, though they did dally enough to replace their ruined clothing. They bought warmer things; for winter, still a while away, made her icy presence known earlier in the north and Jin had already proven himself sensitive to the cold.

"I just hope no one mistakes you for an animal and fires an arrow at you," Kame said, looking at Jin's fur-trimmed collection. "You look tempting to a hunter."

"As long as I don't look tempting to a dragon, that's fine."

"You're not wearing any gold or jewels so I think you'll be okay."

"I don't normally have the kind of money to buy any," Jin pointed out. "I had to sell my gold necklace to buy my guitar, and I never replaced it."

They broke off long enough to respond to the gate guard's farewell, then picked up the discussion again as they started on the road.

"I still find that odd," Kame said. "About the gold necklace. You say you didn't have anything else when you were found, not even clothes?"

Jin nodded. "Plain gold chain around my neck, with an empty stone setting. I don't know what was in it."

"Strange. Why would someone take the stone but leave the chain? Why not take the whole thing?"

"Maybe it fell out somewhere? One of the doctors suggested that I'd stripped off to go swimming - except for the necklace - and tired myself out, returning to land as soon as I could instead of wherever I'd left my clothes. They never did find them. The stone might be lying at the bottom of the bay somewhere."

"I could see that, but then what happened to your memory?"

Jin's shoulders drooped. "Your guess is as good as mine."

He shrugged off all attempts at further conversation on the subject so Kame dropped it, content to do the talking himself, telling stories about his apprenticeship to keep Jin entertained. He'd been quite a handful as a kid, always sneaking off to play ball games, and even though it had become second-nature by now, manipulating magic hadn't come naturally to him.

"How far do you think we'll have to go?" Jin asked after Kame had run out of stories. "I know the plan is go north, but..."

"Dragons live in the mountains," Kame explained. "They find caverns or make their own to hold their hoards, in places thieves find it hard to reach. But I don't know where this particular dragon makes his lair."

"So you keep asking. But how do you know it's definitely the right dragon?"

"Because this is the only one with red trim on his scales. One of Kimura's forebears turned all the rest to stone over a century ago, leaving only an unhatched egg behind. It's amazing what sort of books you can find when you're looking for something to read to your comatose mentor."

"Is transformative magic only illegal on humans, then?"

Kame smirked. "I didn't say he did it legally, did I? I read it was revenge for a dragon raid on his hometown. He left the egg because it was still unhatched, and according to the books I read, dragon breeds can't mix. The one we're after is the last of his kind."

He had no plans beyond finding the dragon, as yet, despite his bold words to Koki before. His magic would be useless against it the moment he drew it from the atmosphere to use in a spell, and though he considered himself to be in good shape, dragonslayers tended to be twice his height and three times as bulky and Kame just didn't feel up to wrestling with the beast. Stealth was a far better option. Infiltrate the dragon's lair, find the ruby, snatch it and sneak out - without magic. The dragon would detect them in a heartbeat if Kame cast any spells.

Jin didn't ask for details, and Kame got the impression his mind was elsewhere for the time being. He liked that, that they didn't have to fill every second of silence with meaningless chatter. After so long travelling alone Kame appreciated the moments where he didn't feel obliged to entertain - though Jin's brilliant smile and adorable high-pitched giggle made Kame want to amuse him constantly.

Night fell before they reached the next town, which meant they camped out for the night, leaving the road to find a clear spot near the river. Unfortunately, it was only as Kame took out his small travel tent that he remembered it was designed to hold a single person.

"It's going to be a tight squeeze," he warned. "Hope you're not too fond of breathing."

"Can't you magic it bigger?" Jin asked.

Kame cast a nervous glance towards the horizon. Surely no dragon was going to pick up a tiny little spell at this distance? "I can try, but I can't guarantee it'll hold its shape. Not anymore."

"As long as it keeps us covered, I don't care if it's got no shape at all - it looks like rain again." Jin suddenly brightened. "Hey, how about if I play for you? Nakamaru used me to help him focus, right? So maybe I could do the same thing for you."

"I've never tried using music as a focus before, but..."

"No good?"

"It's not that it's no good," Kame said carefully, trying not to sound like he was rejecting the idea. "It's just that your music is still doing strange things. Like making that guy fall down repeatedly last night."

"But I wasn't trying to do anything! I never try to do anything with music except make people enjoy it. Uh, not _make_ them enjoy it, but-"

"I get it," Kame said, "but that doesn't change the fact that you're somehow working magic without working magic when you perform."

"Not all the time, though," Jin pointed out. "And I didn't have anything weird like that happen to me until I met you. Maybe it's all your fault."

"And maybe it did but you just never noticed," Kame shot back.

"I'm not completely hopeless, you know!"

"I didn't say you were!"

The cold spatter of raindrops brought an abrupt end to their squabble, as Kame scrambled to get the tent unfolded and bespelled before they both received a soaking. Jin helped him set it up and then stood back with their bags, giving him plenty of room to work.

Kame stared at the small blue bubble. Expanding objects wasn't like sliding a bolt into place, where he moved an object in one direction, or like creating a magelight, where he compounded magic into a ball. This required thought in all directions, or he'd end up with the tent longer on one side than the other.

First, he reached for the sparks in the atmosphere, relishing the tingling in his fingertips of power burning to be used. Next, he wielded that power as a blade, slicing the bonds between each thread of the canvas to create gaps at regular intervals. If he didn't hold the tent together by magic, it would collapse in a heap of loose strands.

Sweat beaded at Kame's temples from sheer exertion. The tent might've been lightweight in real terms, but magically holding the pattern took visualisation beyond his current level of focus - he might as well have been building a house with his mind. But if he let go now, the tent would be ruined for good.

"I don't think I can finish this," he forced out through clenched teeth. "I can't-"

He gave up on speech when he caught a snatch of melody in the air; a faint tune from behind, a few soft words, now growing louder as Jin approached.

 _"Don't you ever stop..."_

As Jin fell into place beside him, still singing and tapping put a beat against his thigh, Kame felt a surge of clarity he'd been missing for two years. The lyrics swirled around his head in vivid colours, in stormy purple and bright pink backed with sunshine and a strength Kame recognised as his own, morphed and fed back to him by Jin's song.

Inside his mind the tent took shape and held, steady as a rock. Now he could begin the expansion. Slowly, Kame wove strips of magic between the canvas strands, pushing them aside in all directions to add extra cover to the body. Little by little, the tent gained material till he judged it large enough to fit them and their bags comfortably, and by then, Jin had stopped singing.

Kame released the excess magic into the atmosphere and examined his handiwork. The tent seemed sturdy enough when he prodded it.

"Told you I could help," Jin said, smirking. "My rhythm helped you keep your spell on track."

"I'm not so sure it was the rhythm...but let's talk about it once we're inside!"

They rushed to move their things inside the tent, which was now tall enough for them to stand up (provided Jin didn't mind his hair sweeping the ceiling) and easily wide enough to take their belongings. They spread their bedrolls side by side on Jin's blanket. Rain beat down but Kame's magic held, keeping them as dry as if they'd been in a house.

"I should've started travelling with a mage ages ago," Jin said. "You must be great company on camping trips."

"Wouldn't know; last time I went on one I couldn't use magic. If the whole thing collapses in the middle of the night, I'm sorry."

"It won't." The unshakeable faith in Jin's voice made Kame smile. "I believe in you."

It had been a while since anyone had said that to Kame, largely because the people who knew him best were in his past, now, and the people he met nowadays didn't know him very well, if at all.

After a cold meal (Kame didn't feel inclined to start a fire in the tent) Jin produced a surprise in the form of a couple of bottles of beer, part of his victory haul from Sendai.

Kame hesitated before accepting his. "After the last time I'm not so sure it's a good idea..."

"There are no demented stalkers with barrels out here, Kame," Jin huffed. "I don't think we're in any danger of getting drowned in ale."

"Not what I meant."

Jin sighed and took a swig of his beer. "I told you, I don't have much practice reading between the lines. If you've got something to say to me, say it, because I'm never going to know otherwise."

"I don't think you're human!" Kame blurted out.

Jin's beer slipped from his fingers, luckily landing intact on the blanket without spillage. "You don't..."

"At least, not completely. Jin, you just did something I've never encountered before - something you shouldn't be able to do.

"I drew the magic from the atmosphere - and you drew it from me, sharpened it with your song and fed it back for me to use. It wasn't the beat that helped me focus - it was you and the music inside you. Nakamaru and I couldn't sense you draining magic from the atmosphere because you were draining it from _us_ instead. Even inside the anti-magic field; I couldn't use the little bit of magic I had stored, but after your song persuaded the guard to take us out, it had vanished."

"Um..." Jin licked his lips nervously, pale now at Kame's accusation. "But that doesn't mean I'm not human, right? Maybe I'm just a really weird mage who uses other people's magic."

"Humans don't do that," Kame said gently. "But dragons do. And demons granted human bodies do. Creatures of magic can't draw it directly from the atmosphere, so they take it from other sources."

"Do I look like a dragon to you!"

"I'm not saying you're a dragon! Jin, I have no idea what you are, I just don't think you're completely human."

When Jin abandoned his beer and headed for the exit, Kame realised he could've picked a more tactful way to explain his thoughts. (Not that there was ever a tactful way to tell a friend you're not sure about his species, but still...)

"Don't." He caught Jin's sleeve to make him stay, pulling him back down to the blanket. Jin's face was shuttered, lips clamped together in a thin line which no words could break, but his eyes glittered with anger. "It's raining pretty hard out there. You'll get sick."

"So I'm human enough for that?" Jin spat out, tearing his arm free from Kame's grasp.

"Yeah. You asked me to be straightforward, Jin, so that's what I'm trying to do. Did I say it would be a problem for me if you weren't human? No. I don't care." He laid a hand on Jin's wrist, resisting all attempts to shrug him off. "But I need to understand what you're doing because it might have something to do with your lack of memory, and I want to help."

"Insulting me is a funny way of helping."

"I could be wrong," Kame conceded. "And I didn't intend it as an insult."

Jin twisted on the blanket until he could lean back-to-back against Kame, Kame's fingers still wrapped loosely around his wrist. He spoke so softly his words were barely audible, even at that distance.

"But you could be right, too."


	6. Chapter 6

Morning found both men tired and out of sorts after a long night listening to the rain do its best to punch holes in the tent. They'd sat stationary for a while, Kame providing silent support without ever letting go, Jin soaking up comfort from Kame's warmth at his back. Neither had moved until Kame had begun to fall asleep, at which point Jin nudged him awake long enough to transfer to his bedroll. They didn't speak save muttered goodnights.

At least morning brought the sun, and a pleasant breeze to cool them as they walked. Jin nipped outside to answer the call of nature while Kame answered a call of a very different kind - Nakamaru had, as promised, sent a message to the mirror. Kame flipped it open to hear what his fellow mage had to say.

"I can't speak for long," Nakamaru said. The mirror's surface was too small for Kame to see more than his face, but the sound of hooves in the background said Nakamaru had done the sending while still riding with Taguchi. "I just remembered something that might help. When I had Jin help me with my recycling spell, I felt extremely tired afterwards - more than I'd have expected. At the time I thought it was just the size of the spell wearing me out, but thinking back to the experience, even the excess magic I'd been storing myself was drained, and I hadn't intended to use it.

"I think Jin used it, and the magic I extracted from the atmosphere. It was my spell, and I was the one doing the work, but I could feel interference and I'm sure that was from Jin. If he's picking up magic from mages rather than the air... Kame, I don't know what that makes him but it's beyond my experience and, I suspect, beyond yours. Be careful."

Kame snapped the mirror shut once the message finished and he could see nothing more than his own puzzled reflection. Nakamaru might be home by now but Kame had nothing to say to him yet, except to confirm his suspicions on the way Jin used magic. Jin obviously wasn't a dragon, and if he was a demon in a human body he didn't act at all the way Kame would've expected. Not evil enough, for one thing. Slightly sadistic, somewhat stubborn and frustrating at times, but not evil, and with no more than the usual portion of human greed.

Could he simply be a new breed of mage? Kame had had plenty of time to think about it while sleep eluded him the previous night. It didn't explain the amnesia, though, and frankly he couldn't see why nature would produce a mage who could only use magic when other mages were around to provide it for him. It didn't seem like a particularly good trait to introduce to the human race.

Then again, when had anything ever made sense where magic was concerned?

"Are you going to do anything with that mirror or are you just holding it for fun?" Jin asked when he returned to find Kame still lost in thought.

Kame decided to be upfront about it. "Message from Nakamaru."

"He wrote on your mirror? It wasn't in lipstick, was it?"

"It was a recorded message," Kame said, giggling. "He sent me an image of himself talking."

"Magic?"

"Yep."

"Cool. I wonder if I can do it?"

"Probably, as long as there's someone around to draw power for you." Kame sighed, no longer laughing. "Nakamaru reached the same conclusion as I did last night about you and magic. He didn't take the theory as far, but..."

Jin sat down heavily on his bedroll, drawing his knees up to his chest. "So that's two in favour of me not being human. Can I get a third opinion?"

"Not unless we go find ourselves another mage to ask, and I don't think that's a good idea unless you'd like to volunteer your body for experiments."

"Not really." Jin pursed his lips in thought, then added, "Unless it was you conducting the experiments. I think I could live with that. Maybe."

"Oh no." Kame shook his head vigorously. "The last time I tried experimental magic, I wound up summoning a dragon. We stick with the original plan - that is, if you still want to come with me? I know I said some pretty painful things last night."

"You did...but you also admitted you could be wrong. It's bad enough I don't know _who_ am - I don't want to start having doubts about _what_ I am, too."

"You're Jin Akanishi," Kame said. "A Guild bard and a talented singer. My friend. That's who and what you are. Will that be enough for now?"

A smile spread slow and sweet across Jin's face. "I think it might be."

\-----

Kame hadn't been able to shrink the tent again but at least magic didn't weigh anything, so while the tent ended up sticking out of his bag, it didn't add to his burden. Over the next fortnight, he and Jin made steady progress; sometimes on foot, sometimes cadging a lift from passing travellers. Ordinarily Jin might've played, thanking the kind strangers with a song or two, but under the circumstances they both thought it best he keep his music to himself for now.

Despite Kame's reluctance to experiment they did so a couple of times, always in open spaces with no one else around. He wanted to know why Jin's ability didn't always work. For a mage, it was different. When Kame consciously chose to use magic, provided he had access to it his spells worked. But Jin had never made that decision.

"I was right beside you while you were busking and only the one song had any magical consequences," Kame mused. "So it doesn't have anything to do with the proximity of a mage, as long as there's one around."

"And now there's _always_ one around." Jin swatted Kame with his towel as they dressed.

Sharing a room had become a routine now, and to Kame's surprise, so had sharing a bed. As the nights became cooler, Jin had stuck close to him during the night in order to steal his body heat, and Kame couldn't find it in himself to object, frustrating though it was. Since Jin wouldn't pick up on any hint short of Kame actively pouncing on him, Kame figured it was safe enough.

For both of them. Either Kame became dragonbait, in which case getting further involved with Jin would only lead to heartbreak, or he'd survive and they'd manage to restore Jin's memories, in which case Jin might well remember the existence of a wife and three kids and go haring off to find them. Not very likely, Kame thought, but possible. Even if they never recovered the ruby, Kame didn't rule out being able to work the spell successfully - not with what he now knew about how Jin's ability worked.

"Let's try something," Kame suggested one night. "I have a theory."

"It's practically midnight, my legs have gone to sleep and the rest of me would like to follow, and you have a theory?"

"I do." Kame crooked a finger and the oil lamp flickered to life; Jin squawked and covered his eyes with his hand. "Do you know any songs that mention light?"

Jin peeked out between splayed fingers. "A couple. Why?"

"Sing one of them? Quietly."

"If you want a lullaby to help you sleep, next time just ask me straight out," Jin said, but he consented to sing a little of a song he called 'Rush of Light'.

"That's enough," Kame said after a minute. He'd been monitoring the movement of magic in the atmosphere - no effect yet. He extinguished the lamp, plunging them into darkness once more. "Now sing it again, and this time imagine you really want the light on."

"I don't want it on; I want to sleep," Jin grumbled. Nevertheless, he sang another verse.

Motes of magic swirled in the air when Kame looked for them, some fading out altogether through use. The oil lamp lit up the room.

"Magic use can be affected by will and desire to achieve something," Kame explained. "The times when you've used borrowed magic, you've had strong thoughts about what you've eventually achieved, whether it's being rescued from a cell, getting people to give you money, or simply having shelter from the rain.

"You're singing with intent, Jin."

"Great. Can I go to sleep now?"

Kame gave up. Here they were, making exciting new discoveries, and Jin wanted to sleep. Though to be fair, it had been a long day and they planned to move on in the morning. They should enjoy having real beds while they could.

He just hoped Jin didn't know any songs about massacres.

\-----

Jin didn't want to go to Aomori. Kame had suggested it, not because he really wanted Jin to wait for him in Aomori, but simply because his natural politeness and protective nature demanded he at least make the offer. Jin refused, equally politely, and they found a boatman willing to take them across Mutsu Bay.

Once across the water, the answers Kame received to his questions led him to believe the dragon made his home at Mt. Kamabuse. Mages were harder to find in the north; sometimes, if they couldn't locate a branch of the Mages' Guild, they took advantage of Jin's newly-qualified membership to enquire at the Bardic Guild instead. Bards always knew the stories, the secrets of any town, and Jin loved having the opportunity to flash his pin, a vine-wrapped quaver that proved he was one of them.

"I don't know why you just don't wear it all the time," Kame said. "You're obviously very proud of it."

"Maybe I should get it tattooed on my arm."

"Like Koki did with his Mages' Guild emblem."

"That's not the only tattoo he's got," Jin said with a smirk. "You wouldn't believe the others he showed me when we were in the men's room together."

Kame could easily believe it, after seeing Koki's performance. "You shouldn't be alone in bathrooms with lecherous mages."

"Are you counting yourself in that number? Because you definitely watched me dress this morning."

"I was checking for signs of frostbite," Kame retorted, and stormed off to refill his water bottles before Jin could see how red his face had become.

Realistically, frostbite wasn't yet an issue, and Kame didn't expect it to be unless it took them a lot longer than he thought to reach Mt. Kamabuse, but Jin always exaggerated his shivers anyway and as tempted as Kame was to suggest bedwarming activities, he kept himself in check.

In any case, beds were no longer an option. Unless some enterprising soul had decided to set up an inn on the mountain's slopes - unlikely with a dragon as a neighbour - they'd be roughing it from now on. They had to minimise their luggage. Jin refused to leave his guitar in storage, even at a Bardic Guildhall, and so Kame had a go at shrinking it.

He practised on large tree branches to start with. The first one exploded, the second one melted, and the third twisted itself into a figure of eight.

"You are _not_ doing that to my guitar," Jin said firmly, clutching the case to his chest.

"You can't carry it up the mountain with you," Kame pointed out. "We don't know how rough the trail's going to be. This'll be hard enough with the gear we actually need."

"Kame, my guitar is the first thing I've ever really owned. It would be like sacrificing an arm or something."

Kame sighed and returned to his practice. It took another four branches and some musical intervention from Jin before he succeeded first in shrinking a branch, then restoring it to full size. Jin insisted he replicate the feat three times before the guitar could undergo the same procedure. He wasn't taking any chances.

Heartened by his success, Kame shrank everything else he could think of, meaning that when they finally left civilisation behind to begin making their way up the mountain, they both had enough shrunken rations to keep them going for several weeks. Not that Kame planned to be there for weeks, but both of them had healthy appetites and he thought it best to be prepared.

"Where do you suppose a dragon would hide out?" Jin asked when they reached the foot of the mountain.

"Much higher up than this." Kame craned his neck and looked towards the peak, too far off for him to see at such an angle. "We've got a lot of walking to do. Possibly a little climbing."

"Which we're not exactly equipped for."

Kame shrugged, trying to sound more nonchalant than he felt. "Dragons need flat ground; they can't live on peaks - they'd fall off when they sleep. I'm expecting to find a plateau big enough for a landing somewhere up there, with a cavern behind it. Possibly a few of them. This dragon's been around a while and the books all say they like their space."

He'd had Nakamaru do some double-checking for him, as the other mage had quite the talent for research. Fortunately, Kame's attempts to send messages via the desk mirror had not resulted in explosions, and the two of them had maintained impromptu communications over the past fortnight. Jin found the whole business of sending absolutely fascinating and couldn't figure out why no one had yet managed to create a non-magical means of communicating over a distance.

"I'd be on it all the time," he said. "What a great way to keep in touch with friends! I don't think it's fair only mages get to do it."

Kame told him to take it up with the Inventors' Guild.

Though chilly, the fair weather ensured their ascent began pleasantly enough. If not for the grim purpose neither of them could forget, they might've been out for a lovers' stroll, walking close on the lower slopes, gloved fingers brushing now and then as they squeezed through a tight pass. And when they reached a path too steep to mount alone, they joined hands and helped each other up. Neither rushed to let go.

"I kind of like this," Jin mumbled, almost too low for Kame to hear.

"This?"

"It feels like we finally got somewhere." He waved his free hand at the vast expanse of slope before them, but Kame wasn't convinced he was referring solely to their geographical progress. "We're not wandering around aimlessly anymore."

"A bit less aimlessly," Kame agreed. "We know it's here somewhere, we just don't know where."

"But we'll find it. Definitely. And in the meantime we get one hell of a view."

Kame, who wasn't enamoured of heights, refrained from looking down as they ascended. He didn't look forward to the view from above. The descent was going to be interesting - assuming he lived long enough for there to be a descent, otherwise he didn't have to worry about it.

They stopped in a sheltered crack for food and rest. Kame spent five minutes fretting that the dragon would notice him using magic to expand the shrunken rations, then realised such a large creature couldn't possibly get more than a claw in their hideaway. He had more to worry about from Jin, who looked ravenous enough to eat a whole dragon by himself.

As a treat, Kame heated up some of their water and stirred in some cocoa powder he'd secretly bought when Jin had been eyeing up the last bakery they'd passed. They had no milk, but it didn't matter - the hot chocolate warmed them both and sweetened their journey.

"I have something too." Jin pulled a small white box from the side compartment of his bag. Kame had seen it earlier, but since Jin hadn't added it to the pile of things to shrink he'd never seen the contents. "I thought if we were going to have a last meal, it deserved a dessert."

"This isn't a last meal," Kame scoffed, though he couldn't be completely certain. "The dragon could still be miles off."

"Just go with it, Kame." Jin opened the box and held it out for Kame's inspection. Inside were two cupcakes in paper cases, each iced in white, with a tiny green turtle drawn on top. "I found these at the bakery while you were buying stuff with more nutritional value. Almost too cute to eat, right?"

Kame smiled widely at him. "Right, but that's not going to stop me and if you can't bear to eat yours-"

"I'll eat it! I'll eat it!"

The delicious cakes disappeared in seconds - as did Jin's paper case, which was picked up by a gust of wind and blown deeper into the crevice. Jin cursed and dashed after it. Kame collected their gear and followed at a more sedate pace.

"I doubt Nakamaru would agree but I don't think it will kill anyone if you leave one little case lying around," he told Jin when he caught up.

"I hope so, because I don't think I'm going to find it. It blew in there." Jin pointed to a dark, narrow passage leading into the mountain itself. "Can you make one of your flying light ball things?"

"Magelight." Kame had worked enough magic in the last twenty minutes - what was one more spell? He produced a light and passed it to Jin. "Here, knock yourself out."

"Thanks."

Kame waited with the bags while Jin disappeared into the passage. The lengths some people would go to for the sake of the environment, he thought. Nakamaru would be proud.

"Kame!"

Jin reappeared at the mouth, clearly agitated about more than a cupcake wrapper.

"What? Did you find a secret mountain restaurant in there?"

"There's something in there, but I'm not sure what." He ducked back inside.

"Hey! You're going in?"

Jin beckoned him over. "I told you, there's something in there. The passage is only narrow for about ten feet - then it expands into a cavern. Will you come with me?"

"Not like I have a choice, is it? But you can at least carry your own bag."

Together, they ventured inside the mountain. Kame's little magelight didn't do much to illuminate the cavern. There didn't appear to be any natural source of light other than the tiny sliver creeping through from the passage, and open space extended far beyond the limits of their vision. Still, there had to be another exit somewhere; Kame could feel magic drifting towards the back, drawn by the movement of air.

Kame caught Jin eyeing the shadows. "What did you see?"

"There." Jin took the light left; Kame followed, straining to make out a shape in the gloom.

"Do you think it's alive?"

"I'm not even sure what it is," Kame murmured back. "Pass me the magelight?"

He spent five minutes examining the strange creature as best he could without actually touching it, shining the light between its stubby wings, with their ragged edges, and along the short forelegs, both ending with crystalline hooves. The beast had no hind legs, merely a great gash across the lower belly, where they might once have existed. No breath emerged from its short snout - if nothing else, Kame could be sure it was dead. Brittle green scales covered the body; when Kame cautiously tapped one with a fingernail, it shattered.

"It's a dragon," Kame decided. "Sort of."

"What do you mean, 'sort of'? Is it the one you're looking for?"

"No; this poor creature's not much bigger than a man, even counting the tiny tail stub."

"Maybe it's a baby?" Jin suggested, giving the dead dragonling a look of pity.

"If it is, it didn't hatch naturally from a dragon's egg. It's a mutant of some kind. Look at the scales." Kame held the magelight next to the body. "It's like someone tried to build a crystal dragon. The scales should be hard, tough enough to protect them, but these are improperly formed. The same could be said for the rest of it. It doesn't even have claws. I'm not about to open its mouth and check the teeth, but-"

"You can't," Jin said, horrified. "It doesn't have any." He retreated behind Kame, looking away from the monstrosity.

Closer examination led Kame to the creature's mouth, nothing more than a scratch below the snout. He estimated it couldn't have opened more than a millimetre or two. If the dragonling had ever drawn breath, it hadn't been for long.

Horror spread in frozen coils through Kame's gut, twisting inside him. No mutation of nature, no matter how serious, could have done this. Someone had created this poor beast using magic. But who would want to create such a thing? The dragonling's wings could never have supported it in flight; with a mouth like that, it could never have fed. Its making must've been either an accident or an act of cruelty.

Heaven help him, Kame had a maddening curiosity to find out which.

"Do you have any songs about regression, looking back into the past, anything like that?" he asked Jin.

"I've written one; why?"

"You know that spell I mentioned, the one for seeing into the past?"

"You want to try it on _this_?"

"It's already dead," Kame said. "I can't make matters worse for it, and I want to know how it came about before I venture any further into the mountain.

"I think someone used magic to make this thing. If that's the case, it should be much easier to regress than a natural being. Will you help me focus?"

With Jin singing 'Reset' behind him, complete with hand gestures, Kame got to work. (He had to get Jin to stop moving his hands after the flickering magelight became too distracting.) He seized great handfuls of magic, each tiny spark a tingle under his skin, and aimed it towards the dragonling.

Jin's music snatched up the magic, merging with it, shaping loose motes into sharp spears that buried beneath the dragonling's scales to tear the cells apart and rebuild them into an older configuration. Wind whipped Kame's fur-edged hood down to his shoulders and ruffled his hair till he looked like he'd spent a week with half a dozen members of the Whores' Guild. He raised a hand to shield his eyes but the wind died, leaving him a glimpse of the past.

A flash of gold-sheathed claw, a silver chain, and all that remained of the dragonling was an emerald necklace.

A bloodstained emerald necklace.

"Don't pick it up." Jin caught Kame's arm, keeping him from touching the silver chain.

"Right; good thinking." Kame turned around to negotiate for the return of his arm. He wanted a closer look at the dark smear along one facet of the jewel, to confirm it really was blood, but not enough to let Jin wrench his arm out of its socket. "You look like you're about to be sick."

"It's just the bad lighting."

Kame wasn't convinced. "Maybe we should go back outside into the fresh air."

"I'm fine, honest. But very confused. What did we just see?"

"I could be wrong, but I think that was our dragon working magic. I'd know those ostentatious gold sheaths anywhere. He must've pulled some from a mage or an existing spell and used it on the emerald necklace."

"To turn it into _that_?"

"I'm sure he didn't mean for it to be such a mess," Kame said. "But transforming a gem into a living, breathing creature isn't like baking a cake. The complications involved are enough to give any mage a headache, and dragons aren't normally much for complexities. In fact..." He frowned, trying to work through the process in his head. "I can't even imagine how you'd get from an emerald to a dragon. The two things aren't remotely alike."

"I know it's illegal but someone must've tried it, surely?"

"Plenty of people, but all the cases involved transforming humans into other creatures or vice versa. Flesh and blood to flesh and blood - not jewellery!"

The necklace glinted wickedly at them from the shadows, silver chain flashing in the magelight, and Jin tightened his grip on Kame's arm. "At least if your dragon did this, we know we're on the right path. Let's keep going."

They left the jewel behind to venture deeper into the cavern. Confronted with proof that the dragon had once been there, Kame wished they had some non-magical form of lighting; since he already had one magelight on the go, however, he created a second, that they might light a side each. Not that Kame expected to be able to miss a beast at least twenty-five feet in length, but he'd rather not step on its tail in the dark.

As they walked, Kame listened closely for the sound of an enormous set of lungs at work, or the clack of claws on the ground to betray the dragon's presence. His glimpse into the past had told him nothing about how recently the unfortunate dragonling had been created. It hadn't decomposed; that didn't tell him anything except that the cavern had seen use within the last year. He knew nothing about the decomposition rate of dragons, in any case, and didn't relish the thought of attempting an autopsy on an emerald.

Towards the back of the cavern the walls curved, leading to a wide passage with a gentle upwards slope - wide enough for a dragon to enter with ease. It stretched so far into the distance as to be without end, but they spotted a glimmer of light from another entrance further up. As they walked, the dank, earthy smell gave way to something heavier, like spoiled meat.

"I think this is some sort of corridor," Kame whispered. "With large rooms on each side. I read that dragons sometimes create a set of linked caverns to store their treasure."

"Never mind their treasure," Jin said as he peered into the first room. He sounded queasy. "What about their food?"

"Food? Oh!"

Kame's stomach executed a messy series of somersaults after he made the mistake of following Jin inside. Looking at the floor didn't help, not once he figured out that the dark stain they'd been following from the first cavern was blood. It didn't stop there, either. Reluctantly, he risked a glance around the room, at the bits of broken bodies and shards of stone. Misshapen bones protruded from torn flesh, bathed in congealed blood. A spiked tail lay independent of a body, less than a foot to Jin's right. Kame wasn't sure which he found more disturbing - the tail, or the disembodied head of a dragonling lying directly in their path.

He gulped and said, "This isn't a larder - it's a graveyard."

"Then how about we let the dead rest in peace and try somewhere else?"

"You have the _best_ ideas."

Even so, Kame had to take one more look inside - not from morbid curiosity, but because he wanted to confirm his suspicions. A silver ring, broken brooch and long gold chain lying amongst the ruined dragonling bodies told him all he needed to know. All of them were missing their gemstones.

They backed away, following the grisly blood trail out, and Kame thought he knew what had happened to the first dragonling's hind legs. It could never have made it outside, but that hadn't stopped it trying to crawl away from the remains of its fellows.

"I'm reconsidering being sick," Jin gasped.

Kame nudged Jin's bag aside to rub soothing circles on his back. The stench of death couldn't be helping, especially now they knew the cause. "Just try not to hit my boots."

Jin managed to keep his lunch down; Kame gave him a little of his favourite scent to dab under his nose, figuring no dragon could possibly pick it out with so much for cover.

"This perfume's for girls, isn't it?" Jin asked after sniffing the bottle.

Kame rolled his eyes. "If you want me to arm-wrestle you to prove my manliness, fine, but I don't think now's a good time for it."

"I didn't say a word." Jin finished with the bottle and handed it back so Kame could do the same. "Um...I've been thinking."

There were a dozen witty replies Kame could've made, all of them at Jin's expense, which is why he only said, "About?"

"That dragonling, or whatever it was - if that was made from a jewel, maybe your ruby's been used for something like that too."

"It's quite likely," Kame said. "I saw bits of jewellery mixed in with the bodies. I'm going to have to work the same spell on everything in there to check." He didn't relish the thought, but he had to be sure.

"That means we have to go back in there, doesn't it?"

"You don't have to look?" Kame offered. "I'd rather have you covering my back, anyway, in case there are any more of these around - and still alive."

At least there was no shortage of magic around. Kame thought it must've been extremely frustrating for dragons, to know it was there yet never available to them. Standing back to back with Jin, he worked the spell on the room at large, hoping the bodies weren't too mixed up.

He couldn't do anything about all the blood on the ground. Some of the jewels were set in metal; others stood alone, but all were bloodstained and none of them was his ruby.

Although Jin was the one singing, Kame was the one left panting when they were done, out of practice at working magic on such a large scale. But the more Jin helped him focus, the more comfortable he became with this new way of working. It felt like they'd always been a partnership, like it didn't matter which of them provided the drive and which provided the control because it was all one and the same and the magic didn't care. They made each other stronger, sharing the power between them till they both sang with it.

"No luck?" Jin said.

"None. The place is starting to look like a jewellery store but none of it's mine." At least removing the corpses had improved the atmosphere. "To work this much magic, the dragon must've either spent a lot of time gathering it from spells, or..."

"Or?"

"Or he has a captive mage somewhere to draw magic from the atmosphere for him. It replenishes itself every night - it's not impossible."

"I hope you're wrong about that. Can you imagine being trapped in here? Because I don't want to think about it."

Kame shuddered, suddenly picturing a helpless human kept forever in a cage of rock, with no hope of escape. "That makes two of us."

The next room slanted higher still, uneven floor steep enough to slow their pace. Bloodsmell slowed them further but gave them a reason to keep going; in the middle of the room they found a creature so mutilated, they could only guess at its species.

"No wings," Jin said, holding his magelight over it and trying to look and not look at the same time. "Three and a half legs."

"Whiskers," Kame added. "No scales. Tiny, pointed ears. I think it might be a cat."

"A cat with no eyes." Jin gave up, turning away from the pathetic creature.

"And no teeth. At least this one has a mouth."

"But why a cat, Kame? Do dragons keep pets?"

"Not that I've heard of, but they might, I suppose. It would be hard to feed a cat up here, though!"

Jin started muttering to himself. "Making dragons makes sense. If I was the last of my species, I'd want to make myself a new family too. But cats?"

"That's it!" Kame grabbed Jin in a quick hug - not easy, given the bags and the magelights, but he managed. "I think you've got it. It's the last one left, so it's trying to make more. It must've accumulated thousands of gems over the years."

"You said they can't crossbreed, right? So how could it make sure the new ones were like it?"

"It's forbidden magic, so I can't say for sure, but..." Kame twisted his lips in a grimace. "It'd have to use a piece of itself. Blood, most likely. It's all been bloodstained; I can't tell whether the blood belongs to the source or the result, though."

He braced himself to work the regression spell one more time, forcing himself to look at the subject. A dark strip of fabric stuck out from under the cat's malformed head.

One verse later, they were looking at a stained rhinestone collar, and Kame caught a glimpse from the past of it dangling from a gold-sheathed talon.

"This one was already stained," he said. "The original owner must've bled on it, and the spell used the cat blood."

Proof that it worked for beings other than dragons lent credence to the theory he was trying hard not to think about, the one that made him ache inside. The one he could never share.

"Somebody's pet probably died for this," Jin said mournfully. "I don't expect a dragon could've stolen the collar without killing the cat."

"We can't do anything to help it now." Necromancy topped the list of forbidden magic, and even a Guild mage might not escape the death penalty for that. "Let's check the rest of the room."

Giving the collar a wide berth, they circled the cavern and found it otherwise empty. The cat, which must've been an abomination from the dragon's point of view, had suffered and died alone.

Back in the corridor, an unexpected turn led them to the kind of room Kame had been half-hoping, half-dreading he'd find.

"It must be over twenty feet high!" Jin exclaimed, staring up at the mountain of precious metals and jewels. "You could support an entire country on all this." He turned to Kame. "Where do you want to start?"

Kame wished he knew more about tracing spells. "Wherever we're least likely to cause a landslide."

Jin set down his pack and grinned. "I think we're going to have to climb. Does your ruby have any distinguishing features? There could be hundreds in here, for all I know."

"We can just pile them all in one corner and I'll go through them afterwards," Kame suggested. "It's about this size," he brought his thumb and forefinger together to illustrate, "set in gold, on a fairly thick chain. One of the links is bent out of shape, compressed in the middle."

"Sounds like the one I used to have," Jin said casually. "I'll keep an eye out."

It was impossible to pick a starting point that wouldn't end with them both being buried alive by jewellery. It wasn't just a matter of trinkets, either. The dragon owned entire chests, heavy trunks of wood encrusted with gems and stuffed with even more, not to mention shiny suits of armour and ornamental weapons. And if they started a landslide, the noise would be enough to wake the dead.

Jin found a relatively clear corner where they could toss the discards and got to work on transferring shiny things from one patch of ground to another. Kame dragged a couple of the chests into line to form a barricade, keeping the piles from merging.

In his heart, he knew it was useless. They could be there for a year and still not find his stolen ruby - and not because the dragon had accumulated enough wealth to buy its own continent.

"Please tell me your magic can do something to speed this up," Jin complained. "It was fun for the first five minutes, but now..."

Kame was about to tell him magic didn't have a solution for every problem when a great gust of wind blew through the mountain caverns, making him stagger. A deafening thud accompanied the sudden breeze - the dragon was home.

"Kame, was that-"

"Shush." Kame pressed a finger to his lips. "I think so. Take cover and stay still; I'm going to extinguish the magelights for now."

"But-"

"Shush."

Kame ducked behind one of the satellite gold piles and tugged Jin down beside him, making the magelights wink out the moment they hit the ground. They'd been lucky so far. He didn't want to risk moving till he knew what the dragon was doing. If their luck held, maybe it would settle down for a nap.

Naps didn't appear to be on the agenda. Kame mentally ran through all the offensive spells he knew while giant footsteps approached, heavy thuds teamed with the clacks of gold sheaths on the ground. This had seemed like a much better idea back when he first set out, when the dragon was half a country away and he had his hopes to keep him going. Grand plans didn't amount to much if you got yourself killed trying to carry them out.

Jin's presence next to him hadn't been part of the plan, but it made it easier, somehow, to know he wasn't alone in holding his breath and straining his muscles to keep still as a statue, lest the dragon have sensitive hearing. If only it would fly away again! They no longer had a reason to stay - but Kame couldn't say it, didn't know how and couldn't have even if he'd dared risk speaking.

He searched for Jin's hand in the dark, found gloved fingers and squeezed. Jin squeezed back, pressing down sharply when the dragon arrived.

Kame didn't expect light. Hidden behind a mound of wealth, he couldn't see the cavern entrance, but the dragon had its own source of illumination. Magelight - weak, but enough to see by. The dragon must've been out gathering magic.

Talons raked through stone and metal alike, sending it flying through the room, and Kame wished with all his might that none of the dragon's swipes passed through their hiding place. They'd be sliced to ribbons in a heartbeat. He willed himself not to bolt for the darkest corner of the cavern as a ring shot past his ear.

The sound alone was bad enough. Kame didn't dare peek. It felt like years had gone by before the din stopped and the dragon took slow, heavy steps away from them, presumably having found its quarry. Light faded from the room and Kame sagged against his uncomfortable pillow, ignoring the sharp edges and cold metal biting through his clothes.

"Still want to kill it?" Jin whispered, close enough for his lips to graze Kame's ear. "I'll sing at your funeral, if you want."

"I'm not that ambitious," Kame murmured back. "I think now would be an excellent time to sneak out; it'll be busy for a while, trying to replicate itself now it's stocked up on magic. I'd rather not see the results of the next one."

"Sneak out? But what about finding your ruby? Shouldn't we stay here and search?"

Kame couldn't avoid it any longer. "There's no point in searching for something I've already found."

"If you've already found it then why didn't you say something earlier?" Jin hissed. "I-"

He broke off at the sound of footsteps. The dragon was coming back.

It was getting impatient now. Puffs of smoke drifted past Kame's head, the dragon's breathing laboured enough that he hoped it wasn't preparing to let loose with a blast of fire right then and there. It rooted around for more treasures, sending unwanted goods flying left and right - bad enough with brooches, but suits of armour and bejewelled daggers made considerably more dangerous missiles.

As the dragon dug closer to their hiding place, Kame contemplated emergency measures. With the way dragons could drain the magic from spells to use for themselves, using magic against a dragon was stupid at best - suicidal at worst. Yet it was Kame's only option. There had to be something in his arsenal that would defeat a dragon in an instant, before it had time to suck the spell dry.

What had Kimura's ancestor done to the rest of the breed? Turned them to stone. Kame had always felt more of a connection to the water than the earth - his magic was of the seas and skies; stone was beyond him. But ice...

Yes, ice he could manage. Stop the dragon in its tracks by freezing it solid - and once the brain froze, it wouldn't matter if the body defrosted.

But working rapid magic on something so large took a great deal of power, and Kame couldn't channel it alone.

The dragon made such a racket Kame needn't have bothered whispering but did so anyway. "Do you know any songs about freezing?"

"I'm feeling a bit hot under the collar too but-"

"Not for that," Kame hissed. "I'm going to turn the dragon into an ice statue and I'd appreciate some backup."

Jin rocked back as something heavy flew past and buried itself in the back wall. "I'll sing 'Freeze' for you - just make sure you get him!"

Kame gave Jin a minute to get going before he reached for the freeflowing magic surrounding them. He had to take in as much as possible before the dragon realised it wasn't home alone. They didn't have long. The last of their cover vanished in a shower of flying metal and they instinctively turned to shield each other from the storm.

No chance the dragon would mistake them for part of its collection. It glared at them with the same fierce amber eyes Kame remembered from two years ago - eyes with neither mercy nor pity for creatures small enough to vanish in one snap of those enormous jaws, which began to part. Kame braced himself to withstand a roar that could well deafen them both, at such a distance and in an enclosed space. He had to be faster, or the blast of air alone would crush them against the walls.

Magic and adrenaline raced through his body, one to keep him upright and the other to take every ounce of concentration he could spare and use it to infiltrate the dragon's body, dropping the temperature of every individual cell far below freezing. Jin's music threaded itself through the magic, bound them together in a thin, tight arrow that pierced the red-rimmed black scales of the dragon's hide to attack the tender flesh beneath. With every word Jin sang, Kame felt surer, sharper, as if he could aim blind and hit the target dead-centre every time. Even better than he'd felt two years ago.

Time slowed down but he knew it couldn't be more than a few seconds, or his magic would've been snatched away, sucked up by the dragon for its own purposes. On the word "FREEZE" the temperature dropped immediately. Kame shivered and pressed closer to Jin, as much for comfort as for warmth. If this didn't work...

But it did. When the dragon's weak magelight died altogether and left them to freeze in the dark, Kame risked producing one of his own. Light confirmed for him what the silence could only hint at - the dragon breathed no more.

Jin beamed with pride. "You did it!"

"We did it," Kame corrected, returning the grin. "I couldn't have directed that much without you."

Warily, he circled the frozen dragon. It might as well have been made of glass. His light shone through organs and extremities alike, refracted at crazy angles.

"Maybe we can pretend we sculpted it and win an art prize?" Jin suggested.

"Me? Win an art prize? No one would ever believe it. Besides, it would melt before we could even begin to move it out of here."

"So it really will melt, then?"

Kame nodded. "I think so - eventually." He patted the dragon's massive foreleg, wincing as the cold bit even through his gloves. "Either way, I'm afraid we've just finished the job my mentor's ancestor began. No more failed experiments - but no more of this breed, either."

Jin's smile faded. "I don't want to feel sorry for it, but..."

"Yeah, I know. Me too."

They left the dragon in the middle of its ravaged treasure room, now such a mess they clambered over the wreckage to reach the exit. Jin almost forgot to pick up his bag - luckily, it had only been partially buried by jewels.

Kame insisted on checking the rest of the cavern system to ensure none of the failed dragonlings remained; they found only another graveyard, and the main entrance where, as predicted, a large plateau served as a take-off and landing point. Unfortunately, the landscape there proved too steep for humans to traverse, so they were forced to retreat through the corridor to their original point of entry, the room with the emerald necklace.

Once back on the path, they paused to inhale great lungfuls of clean, cold air, free from the taint of old blood and decaying flesh. Kame used magic to return a flask of brandy to full size - while not a favourite tipple of either of them, they appreciated its restorative qualities.

"So where is it?" Jin asked after his turn with the flask. "You said you'd already found your ruby."

"I can't show you." Kame couldn't think of any way to drop the subject, to tell Jin to forget about the ruby after they'd come all this way to retrieve it. He had his ruby, and yet he didn't have it. Could never have it again, because his ruby was no longer his ruby. "But we're done here, okay? There's nothing for us to find."

"Then why the hell did we come here?" Jin made an aborted grab for Kame's coat. "We were going to get your focus back so you could help me find out who I am! What about that plan, huh?"

"I can't help you," Kame said flatly. Whatever happened, he was going to lose Jin. "There's no way I can use that spell on you - it'll annihilate you, destroy everything that you are."

"You lied to me."

"I didn't- I didn't lie to you, Jin. I didn't know until we got here that I couldn't do anything for you."

"But why? You managed it for a dozen dragonlings and a dead cat, didn't you?" Jin's anger suddenly softened to confusion. "Or is it because I helped with the spell then, is that it? You think you need me to perform the spell, and I can't help you _and_ have it done to me at the same time. Then surely that's all the more reason for you to have your focus!"

"I already have my focus." Kame licked dry lips, wishing he'd thought to bring a chapstick up the mountain with him. But given what he was about to say, perhaps bringing a medkit would've been a better idea. He didn't imagine for one second that Jin would take it well, though he deserved to know. "It's you, Jin. You're my focus."

"Yeah, and I'm glad I've been able to help you out with that," Jin said blithely, "but you need to get your ruby back."

"I told you, I've already got it. It's you."

"Quit playing around like this, Kame! First you tell me you think I'm a dragon or a demon, and now you tell me I'm an inanimate object. If you're trying to get rid of me why don't you just push me off the mountain and be done with it?"

"I wish I was playing." Kame knew Jin wouldn't want anything to do with him now, but he couldn't fob him off with half-truths. "I suspected when I saw the cat, but I knew for sure when you told me about the necklace. It's the only explanation for everything.

"Two years ago a dragon stole my ruby, set in a gold chain with one bent link. It flew northward, gathering up magic as it went, and returned home to continue its experiments with jewels. It used its own blood, but where foreign blood had already contaminated the jewel, something else was produced instead. We know some of them lived, at least for a short while, and one of them even dragged itself all the way to another chamber.

"But only one of them survived, in the end. A human, perfectly formed, and wearing nothing but the empty gold necklace from which he'd been born. A necklace with a bent link, and bloodstains from where I'd cut myself on the prongs." Kame wanted to stop, could see the terrible truth sink in where Jin's lips parted in half-formed protests, but he couldn't take it back. "That human was you. I doubt you could've made it all the way down from here and across to the other side of Mutsu Bay by yourself; I think the dragon must've taken you there. No reason for it to keep you, and a human wouldn't last long here.

"That's why you handle magic like a focus, and why your memories don't go back very far. You haven't been alive that long. If I try to use that regression spell on you, I'll turn you back into a ruby - and I'm not prepared to do that. That's why I can't help you. I'm sorry, Jin."

"That doesn't make any sense." A raw, strained note roughened Jin's voice. "I can't be like those _things_ in there. How can I possibly be your missing ruby? You tell a lousy story, Kame."

"Then teach me how to tell a better one, Mr. Professional Bard."

"See, how can I be a fake person and a member of the Bardic Guild? How does that work out?"

"What makes you think you're a fake person?" Kame said gently. "You've done exactly the same as any other human being. You found something you love to do, you worked hard at it, you passed the trials for the Bardic Guild, you made friends, you made memories - you just started late in relation to your physical age, that's all. Everyone has to start somewhere."

"Yeah, and most people start by being born to parents - I know that much, at least." Jin brushed away the hand Kame offered. "I think I wish you'd lied to me after all."

"Lying to you wouldn't have solved anything, even when the truth is so painful. Anyway, friends shouldn't lie to each other."

"Why would you want to be friends with something you used to wear round your neck?" Jin said bitterly.

This time Kame didn't let Jin push him away. Perhaps a mountain crevasse wasn't quite the right place for this sort of thing, but Kame figured that since they'd met for the first time in a jail cell, there was absolutely nothing orthodox about their relationship to start with. He slid his arms around Jin's neck, nudging the hood aside to nest one gloved hand in the mess of brown curls.

"If you want a parent, I guess you've got me. After all, you're human because my blood was on the ruby.

"But I don't want to think of myself as your parent. You're my important partner, no matter what form you're in. You're the reason I can work magic the way I do. You're my friend, and if you want reassurance that you're human, ask yourself this: would I do _this_ with anyone who wasn't?"

Jin had asked him before to be obvious, and Kame couldn't think of anything more obvious than a kiss, pressing his lips lightly to Jin's in a gesture that promised a great deal more once they were safely off the mountain. Jin's strangled gasp of surprise didn't stop him melting into the kiss when Kame went for a second round, this one more intense now he was sure Jin had no objections. The hand settling on his hip certainly wasn't there to shove him away, at any rate.

"Your story has a surprise twist in the plot," Jin said, slightly breathless.

"But does it have a happy ending?"

"It's too early to tell yet." Kame's heart skipped a beat when Jin gave him a hopeful smile and added, "But I think it might."

\-----

 **Epilogue - One year later**

"Same time again tomorrow," Jin said. "Don't forget to learn your lyrics!"

Twenty laughing children skipped merrily from the classroom, watched with fond indulgence by their teacher - who in turn was being watched by his partner with equal warmth. Kame didn't always make it back in time to meet Jin after class, but petitions had been light at the Guildhall today and he'd taken the opportunity to slip away to the school where Jin had been teaching music for the past two months. Jin was a natural with kids, and if he wasn't quite as stern a teacher as he could've been, he knew how to make them love him - and if they loved him, they'd work hard for him.

"They're coming along nicely," Kame said. "You think they'll be ready for the show next month?"

"They'd better be. I'd like to leave on a high note."

So they were going to stick with the pattern, then. Move to a new town, check in with their respective guilds and take on requests until one of them suggested moving on, usually after a few months. This time Jin had been asked to cover for a sick music teacher, and Kame wondered if he might want to take it up permanently. Teaching was as close to kids as Jin was ever going to get. Despite Kame's constant assurances that he was as human as the next guy, Jin was still haunted by his origins, and unwilling to even consider fathering his own children. (Which suited Kame fine, given that it would've involved Jin sleeping with someone else, and there hadn't been anyone else for either of them since they'd discovered the truth.)

"Where do you want to go next?" Kame asked. "Anywhere in particular?"

"How about Fukushima? I saw that message from Nakamaru. They still need help with the repairs, don't they?"

Nakamaru, the unlikely social hub, had taken it upon himself to investigate areas worst affected by the dragon's flight north once Kame had explained the whole situation to him - not easy to do via a pair of hand mirrors. His guidance had directed their travels so far, and wherever Kame landed up in a town where the Mages' Guild worked to repair wards, he would always volunteer for the task.

"Yeah; he said Koki wrote about it in his latest letter. I don't know why they don't just do sendings to each other..."

Jin flashed him a grin, with an impishness Kame thought he'd never grow tired of seeing. "He's got to use up all that purple paper somehow."

"Okay, Fukushima it is - after you've scandalised every parent in town by making their kids sing about sleeping with women they've met in clubs."

"I'm not teaching them that one! I don't want to get arrested again. Jail's no fun without you."

"I don't remember it being a lot of fun _with_ me, to be honest..."

Jin grabbed his coat from the back of the chair. "Anyway, all the songs in the show are going to be totally family-friendly. Don't want the Guild to kick me out."

"It's membership for life," Kame said. "All they can do is make sure no one ever hires you again, so I'd have to support us both and then you'd never see me because I'd be working all the time, and-"

"Enough!" Jin batted him over the head with his coat sleeve. "You're never going to have to carry me again, you hear? I'm not a stone around your neck."

Kame caught the sleeve on Jin's second attempt, glanced quickly at the classroom door to check no one was waiting outside, and cupped his partner's jaw with his free hand. "It's about time you realised that."

He'd been accused of being too fond of his accessories before, but falling for a man who'd once been his flawed ruby didn't bother him much. It helped that he'd seen Jin as a human before he'd ever had to think of him as otherwise. The gemstone and the bard with the beautiful voice were worlds apart; for Kame, they only crossed paths when he worked magic.

Even then, the comparison was unjust. The ruby had been nothing more than a tool, an unthinking, insentient crystal with no purpose save to focus his power - a far cry from a living, breathing human being with a heart and mind of his own, who could take the power Kame wielded and twist it as he pleased. Dangerous, if mage and focus were unaligned, or disagreed on the intent of the spell, but Kame didn't think that would be a problem now. He didn't often need to call on Jin's assistance, not with the scale of petitions he usually worked on, but they always planned it out carefully, selecting the perfect song for the occasion.

Besides, no mere accessory could make Kame so happy.

"I realised it a while ago," Jin said, dark eyes sparkling with mischief. "I just like to give you a reason to remind me."

"I'll remind you as many times as you like," Kame narrowed the distance between them till they were close enough to share breath, "as long as you promise to tell me when you _really_ need a reminder."

"Promise."

A flawed stone had become a flawed human, but also Kame's perfect partner - and in this partnership, they sealed every deal with a kiss.


End file.
